The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now so huge and permanent that a coastal ecosystem is thriving on it

CNN
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Scientists have found thriving communities of coastal creatures, including tiny crabs and anemones, living thousands of miles from their original home on plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a 620,000 square mile swirl of trash in the ocean between California and Hawaii.

In a new study published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday, a team of researchers revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive and reproduce on plastic garbage that’s been floating in the ocean for years.

The scientists said that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean.

Unlike organic material that decomposes and sinks within months or, at most, a few years, plastic debris can float in the oceans for a much longer time, giving creatures the opportunity to survive and reproduce in the open ocean for years.

“It was surprising to see how frequent the coastal species were. They were on 70% of the debris that we found,” Linsey Haram, a science fellow at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the study’s lead author, told CNN.

Haram and her colleagues examined 105 items of plastic fished out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between November 2018 and January 2019. They identified 484 marine invertebrate organisms on the debris, accounting for 46 different species, of which 80% were normally found in coastal habitats.

“Quite a large percentage of the diversity that we found were coastal species and not the the native pelagic open ocean species that we were largely expecting to find,” Haram said.

They did still find a lot of open ocean species, Haram added. “On two thirds of the debris, we found both communities together … competing for space, but very likely interacting in other ways.”

Haram said that the consequences of the introduction of new species into the remote areas of the ocean are not yet fully understood.

“There’s likely competition for space, because space is at a premium in the open ocean, there’s likely competition for food resources – but they may also be eating each other. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but we have seen evidence of some of the coastal anemones eating open ocean species, so we know there is some predation going on between the two communities,” she said.

How exactly the creatures get to the open ocean and how they survive there remains unclear. Whether, for example, they were just hitching a ride on a piece of plastic they attached themselves to by the coast, or whether they were able to colonize new objects once they were in the open ocean, is unknown.

Oceans of plastic

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is twice the size of Texas, is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world.

The patch is bounded by an enormous gyre – the biggest of five huge, spinning circular currents in the world’s oceans that pull trash towards the center and trap it there, creating a garbage vortex.

It’s a mistake to think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an island of trash, though, Matthias Egger, the head of environmental and social affairs at The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit developing technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, told CNN.

“If you’re out there, what you see is just pristine blue ocean,” said Egger, who helped Haram’s research by collecting the samples in the patch, fishing them out with a net.

“You can think of it like the night sky. If you look up at night, you see all those white dots, that’s essentially what you see in the garbage patch. It’s not that dense, but there are a lot of them … out there, you start seeing more and more plastic the longer you look,” he said.

The Ocean Cleanup initiative estimates there are about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch that weigh an estimated 80,000 tonnes. The majority of the plastic found in the patch comes from the fishing industry, while between 10% and 20% of the total volume can be traced back to the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world produces around 460 million tons of plastic a year, a figure that — without urgent action – will triple by 2060.

Globally, only around 9% of plastic waste is recycled, according to UNEP. As much as 22% of all plastic waste is mismanaged and ends up as litter, with large amounts eventually making it into the oceans.

Scientists have warned there has been a “rapid and unprecedented” increase in ocean plastic pollution since 2005.

“The problem is getting bigger and bigger by the minute,” Egger said. “We see turtles that are entangled in ghost fishing nets. Sometimes it’s even just turtle carcasses. We see ingestion of plastic fragments. Then there’s also the pollutants – chemicals.”

The Ocean Cleanup has built a huge trash-collecting system, a U-shaped barrier with a net-like skirt that hangs below the surface of the water. It moves with the current and collects faster-moving plastics as they float by.

“We want to look into what’s the impact on marine life. And once we know for sure that it’s safe and it benefits the environment, then we want to scale up,” Egger said.

But cleanup is only part of the solution. A study published last month said that without urgent policy action, the rate at which plastics enter the oceans could increase by around 2.6 times between now and 2040.

The UN Environment Assembly passed a historic resolution last year to end plastic pollution and create the world’s first global plastic pollution treaty by 2024 – a legally binding agreement that would address the full life cycle of plastic, from its production and design to its disposal.

Tracking the chemicals in the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and fire

Tankers of vinyl chloride were going halfway across the country, government records show, a trip highlighting the risks of transporting chemicals as plastics production grows.When a freight train carrying more than 100,000 gallons of hazardous chemicals derailed and burned in East Palestine, Ohio, this year, it set off a panic over rail safety and the toxic fallout for communities downwind.But less has been known about the origins of the chemicals themselves and their intended destination.Much of the train’s vinyl chloride freight — which was ultimately incinerated by emergency responders to avert a wider explosion — came from a chemicals plant in La Porte, just outside Houston, Texas, that is run by OxyVinyls, the chemical arm of Occidental Petroleum, according to the shipment records released by the Environmental Protection Agency. The chemicals were on a 1,600-mile journey to an Oxy plant in Pedricktown, N.J., that makes plastic used in PVC flooring.The details of the cargo were included in an administrative order filed last month by the E.P.A. that was based on shipment data provided by Oxy and other shippers. Oxy had more than 700,000 pounds of vinyl chloride on the train that derailed, the records show. An E.P.A. official on Monday confirmed the accuracy of the information.Tracing the Norfolk Southern train’s volatile load to its source sheds light on the environmental and health risks of the nation’s soaring manufacturing and use of plastics. The chemicals shipped by Oxy were key ingredients in PVC, a rigid material widely used in water pipes, furniture, floor tiles and packaging.Plastic manufacturing is booming in America, fueled by cheap and plentiful shale gas. It has become an increasingly important business for Occidental, a major oil company based in Houston, as nations start moving away from the burning of fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.Texas and Louisiana, in particular, have become global chemical hubs as oil and gas companies expand their plastics production to offset the possibility of declining demand for oil as fuel.While tiny East Palestine has drawn considerable attention for the inferno and its potential health consequences, communities nationwide are regularly grappling with the health and safety implications of the surge in chemical manufacturing and transportation.The OxyVinyls plant in La Porte, Texas, that made much of the vinyl chloride that was burned in the East Palestine derailment.Mark Felix for The New York TimesLast year at Oxy’s La Porte plant, a midnight explosion and fire drew a major response by emergency personnel. More recently, some of the firefighting wastewater from the Ohio train fire, which contained toxic chemicals, was trucked back to a processing facility in Deer Park, Texas, which borders La Porte. And in 2012, a train carrying vinyl chloride — bound for the same plastics plant in New Jersey that was the destination of the Ohio train — derailed and plunged into a creek, releasing 23,000 gallons of the chemical and prompting evacuations of nearby homes.OxyVinyls plans to spend $1.1 billion to expand and upgrade its La Porte plant, the company said in regulatory filings last year. Shintech, the world’s largest producer of PVC, and whose shipments also burned in the Ohio disaster, according to freight records, is spending more than $2 billion to build out its operations in Texas and Louisiana.Oxy officials didn’t respond to several requests for comment.Overall, chemicals companies have invested more than $100 billion in new or expanded plants since 2010, with another $99 billion in the works, according to a tally from the American Chemistry Council. Much of that investment has been in plastics.As plastic production has proliferated, more hazardous materials have been on the move. According to data from the Association for American Railroads, rail shipments of chemicals used in plastic production grew by about a third over the past decade.Chemicals have become a particularly important business for railways because one of their traditional mainstays, coal transportation, has fallen steeply with the drastic decline in the mining and burning of coal. Over the past decade, coal traveling by rail fell by almost half. Agricultural rail cargo, like grain and soybeans, has stayed flat.While derailments have declined since the 1970s, the costs of derailments of trains carrying hazardous materials have increased. Most accidents, injuries and deaths involving hazardous materials in transit happen on the road, and incidents there have jumped by more than 50 percent since 2012, according to Bureau of Transportation statistics.For residents at the starting points for these shipments, concerns over exposure to cancer-causing substances have long been a constant.Sema Hernandez lives near the OxyVinyls La Porte plant. “It could be a normal day, and all of a sudden there’s a siren,” she said.Mark Felix for The New York Times“You get headaches, you get nauseous, and you get chronic respiratory issues that affect you,” said Sema Hernandez, a community organizer who lives with her four children about a half-mile from Oxy’s La Porte facility. Headline-grabbing accidents like the Ohio derailment may bring temporary attention to chemical hazards, she said, but for communities like hers with chemical plants as close neighbors, they are a daily threat.“It could be a normal day, and all of a sudden there’s a siren that goes off that tells you, this is not a drill, to shelter in place,” she said. “That can happen at any time.”Though making plastics doesn’t typically involve burning the oil used in manufacturing them, the production process brings with it other potential hazards. Since the 1970s, for example, numerous studies have found that workers exposed to vinyl chloride, which is made from fossil fuels and is primarily used to manufacture PVC, developed malignant liver cancers. Vinyl chloride has also been linked to brain and lung cancers, lymphoma and leukemia.An analysis published this month by Toxic-Free Future, a nonprofit that advocates safer products and chemicals, found that PVC plastics plants reported releasing more than 400,000 pounds of vinyl chloride into the air in 2021. It also found that people of color were overrepresented in communities near such plants, making up more than 60 percent of the almost 400,000 people who live within three miles of a vinyl-chloride, PVC-manufacturing or PVC-waste-disposal facility, compared with the 40 percent share they make up of the general population.Cleanup at the site of the plastics recycling plant that burned in Richmond, Ind.Michael Conroy/Associated PressUnited Nations officials said in 2021 that pollution-linked cancer risks in predominantly African American districts near a cluster of petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River far surpassed those in districts with predominantly white populations. Last month, residents of St. James Parish, La., at the heart of that region, sued the local council for a pattern of racist land use practices that has placed petrochemical plants in predominantly Black neighborhoods.In recent days, an unrelated fire at a plastics recycling plant in Indiana highlighted the risks at the end of the plastics life cycle. Recyclers nationwide have been struggling to process all the growing supply of discarded plastic, which can end up in piles at facilities in what experts have long called a fire hazard.Some cities in the United States and elsewhere, including New York, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, have adopted policies aimed at phasing out the use of PVC and other products linked to pollution, limiting public purchases and mandating alternatives. A handful of countries, including Canada, Spain and South Korea, have restricted or banned the use of PVC packaging, and legislators have pursued a similar ban in California.Sweden, which adopted restrictions on PVC use almost three decades ago, is phasing out its use altogether, for example, by replacing PVC packaging with less toxic kinds of plastic, including plant-based materials.

Animals are migrating to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not seem like it would be a hospitable place. It is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest streak of land. The sun is brutal and unrelenting there, the waters nutrient poor. There is nothing much to see except the eponymous garbage.But look more closely at this plastic garbage, as scientists did recently, and you’ll find plenty of life: sea anemones as small as a pinky nail or as large as the palm of your hand; white, lacelike bryozoa; hydroids sprouting like orange feathers; shrimplike amphipods; Japanese oysters; mussels. None of these creatures belongs here. They are all coastal animals, adapted to the turbulent, nutrient-rich shores where water meets land, but they have all somehow learned to survive in the open sea, clinging to plastic.According to a new study, these animals are now living side by side in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with creatures that normally inhabit the middle of the ocean. Coastal and open-sea ecosystems are blurring together into a single, plastic-bound one. “As humans, we are creating new types of ecosystems that have potentially never been seen before,” says Ceridwen Fraser, a biogeographer at the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study. The Garbage Patch, far from being some barren wasteland, is the site of an active experiment in biology.Coastal podded hydroid and open-ocean gooseneck barnacles live on floating plastic. (Courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup, in coordination with Smithsonian Institution)The scientists behind this study were originally intrigued by debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami: Even after six years, debris was still washing up in the U.S. laden with creatures native to the Japanese coast. The scientists counted more than 60 species of mollusks alone. If coastal creatures could survive a six-year ocean crossing on plastic, how much longer could they survive? Could they be living on the high seas permanently? Ocean currents tend to trap floating objects in one of five gyres around the world, the most infamous of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between California and Hawaii. If coastal animals have found a new, plastic-based home anywhere in the open ocean, it would be here.The “patch” is less a solid island of trash than a soupy swirl of debris ranging from microscopic pieces of plastic to larger objects such as fishing nets and buoys. Getting there is not easy, because it is so far from land. The scientists teamed up with the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that was testing technology for removing trash from the gyre, to collect and freeze 105 pieces of garbage. Linsey Haram, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, remembers traveling to a California port in late 2018 to pick up trash bags full of nets, bottles, buoys, flower pots, clothes hangers, and buckets. She and her colleagues found coastal species on 70.5 percent of the debris. “We expected to find some; we just didn’t expect to find them at such frequency and diversity,” Haram told me. These migrants were not a minor part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ecosystem.On two-thirds of the objects—essentially tiny floating islands—animals native to coasts were living side by side with animals native to the open ocean. They were smashed together into a single ecosystem and even a single food chain; for example, Haram told me, the coastal sea anemones were eating sea snails. The team also found evidence of the animals reproducing: The anemones were budding off tiny baby anemones, and some of the female crustaceans carried little broods of eggs. This suggests that they have taken up permanent residence and aren’t just eking it out temporarily. Coastal aggregating anemones found on a black floating plastic fragment (Courtesy of Linsey Haram / Smithsonian Institution)Scientists call the ocean surface where water meets sky the “neustonic” or “neustic” habitat. Long before the advent of plastics, this habitat was dominated by natural objects such as kelp, wood, and pumice, on which life could gain a floating toehold. But these were relatively ephemeral. The influx of man-made plastics into the ocean might be “dramatically expanding a long-existing but previously minor habitat,” David Barnes, a marine ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told me in an email. It could also change the neustonic habitat in unpredictable ways: Some of the species that once drifted on organic matter, for example, might make the switch to living on plastics better than others. Scientists previously found that a marine insect named Halobates sericeus might actually be benefiting from the abundance of material in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It once had to lay its eggs on the rare floating feather or pumice stone; now it can just use plastic.The waters around the plastic in the Garbage Patch are teeming with floating life too: Portuguese man o’ wars, blue sea dragons, tiny blue hydrozoans evocatively named by-the-wind sailors. Unlike coastal species that need to hitch a ride on something else, these floating animals likely bobbed here on their own via ocean currents. Little is known about many of them or how the proliferation of tiny plastic islands is affecting them. “We’re trying to learn really basic stuff,” says Rebecca Helm, an ecologist at Georgetown University who has cataloged these creatures in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Cleaning up the plastic around them is not straightforward: Attempts to collect floating debris, she has written, might entrap and threaten these species.Many of the Garbage Patch objects that Haram and her collaborators found covered with coastal animals come from the fishing industry: nets, buoys, ropes, crates, eeltrap cones. These items last so long in the ocean, she pointed out, precisely because they are engineered to last a long time in seawater. They are part of an industry that has destroyed ocean ecosystems by removing billions of fish and shellfish from their home. Its plastic remnants are now also disrupting old ways of life in the ocean, creating new ways that we never intended and cannot yet imagine.

Plastic action or distraction? As climate change bears down, calls to reduce plastic pollution are not wasted

Climate change, pollution and overfishing are just a few problems that need addressing to maintain a healthy blue planet. Everyone must get involved – but it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure where to start.

Of course we can start with the obvious – making sure we reduce, reuse and recycle. Yet, given the scale of the challenge, these small, relatively simple steps are not enough. So, how can we encourage people to do more?

There is controversy about the best approach. Some argue focusing on easy actions is distracting and can lead people to overestimate their positive impact, reducing the chance they will do more.

However, our new research found promoting small and relatively easy actions, such as reducing plastic use, can be a useful entry point for engaging in other, potentially more effective actions around climate change.

Read more:
6 reasons 2023 could be a very good year for climate action

The plastic distraction debate

Marine plastic pollution is set to quadruple by 2050 and efforts to reduce this have received a lot of attention. In this arena, Australia is making significant progress.

For example, last year scientists discovered the amount of plastic litter found on Australian coasts had reduced by 30% since 2012-13. Seven out of eight Australian states and territories have also committed to ban single-use plastics.

Read more:
Why bioplastics won’t solve our plastic problems

Yet, some scientists are concerned all this fuss about plastic distracts us from addressing the more pressing issue of climate change, which is degrading marine ecosystems at an alarming rate and making oceans hotter than ever before.

For example, without an urgent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, coral reefs could lose more than 90% coral cover within the next decade. This includes our very own Great Barrier Reef.

Climate change is the major threat to the Great Barrier Reef.
Yolanda Waters

When it comes to climate action, Australia is behind. Many Australians are also unsure which actions to take. For example, a 2020 study asked more than 4,000 Australians what actions were needed to help the Great Barrier Reef. The most common response (25.6%) involved reducing plastic pollution. Only 4.1% of people mentioned a specific action to mitigate climate change.

‘Spillover’ behaviour

We ran an experiment to test whether we could shift this preference for action on plastic into action on climate change.

Our experiment was based on a theory known as “behavioural spillover”. This theory assumes the actions we take in the present influence the actions we take in future.

For example, deciding to go to the gym in the morning may influence what you decide to eat in the afternoon.

Some experts argue focusing on reducing plastic use – a relatively simple action – can help build momentum and open the door for other environmental actions in the future. This is known as positive spillover.

Conversely, those in the “plastic distraction” camp argue if people reduce their plastic use, they might feel they have done enough and become less likely to engage in additional actions. This is known as negative spillover.

Experimenting with spillover from plastic to climate

To test whether we could encourage spillover behaviour in the context of the Great Barrier Reef, we conducted an online experiment with representative sample of 581 Australians.

Participants were randomly allocated to one of three experimental groups or a control group. The first group received information about plastic pollution on the reef along with prompts to remind them of their efforts to tackle the problem in the past week (a “behaviour primer”). The second group received the reef plastic information only. The third group received information about the reef and climate change. The control group received general information about World Heritage sites, with no call to action or mention of the Great Barrier Reef.

Participants were then asked whether they would be likely to take a range of climate actions, such as reducing personal greenhouse gas emissions and talking to others about climate change. They also had the opportunity to “click” on a few actions embedded within the survey such as signing an online petition for climate action.

Participants were asked how likely they were to take a range of climate actions. (Note: this graphic was not used in the survey.)
Yolanda Waters

Compared to the control group, those provided with information about plastic pollution were more willing to engage with climate actions, particularly when they were reminded of positive past behaviours. Whereas those provided with information about climate change showed no significant difference.

Plastic messages also had a stronger positive effect on climate action for those who were politically conservative, compared to those more politically progressive.

But the approach didn’t work for everyone. We repeated the experiment with 572 self-identified ocean advocates, many of whom already engaged with marine conservation issues. For this audience, talking about plastic and their past efforts made them less likely to engage with climate action compared to the control group.

The ocean is warming at an alarming rate, bleaching coral on the Great Barrier Reef. Should we still be talking about plastic?
The Ocean Agency / Ocean Image Bank

So what does all this mean?

Our results suggest it’s possible to motivate climate action for the reef without slipping back into conversations about plastic. Here are four ways to help achieve this:

Remind people of the small actions they already take: reminding people of their positive contributions and making them feel like they are capable of doing more can open the gateway to further action.
Connect the dots between plastic and climate: plastics are primarily derived from fossil fuels and production alone accounts for billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year. Making it clear that a fight against fossil fuels is a fight against both plastic and climate can help guide people towards those extra climate actions.
Provide clear calls to (climate) action: research shows most people are unable to identify climate actions on their own. As a result, they tend to get stuck on common behaviours such as recycling. Giving people clear advice on how they can contribute to mitigating climate change is crucial.
Know your audience: spillover from plastic to climate is more likely in a general audience. If your network is full of ocean advocates, it might be better to skip the plastic conversation and dive straight into conversations about climate change actions.

It’s important to remember that people’s first steps don’t have to be their only steps. Sometimes, they just need a little guidance for the journey ahead.

Read more:
Households find low-waste living challenging. Here’s what needs to change

Three ways to solve the plastics pollution crisis

Two decades ago, Germany set up a simple scheme to reduce plastic waste. When people buy drinks in a disposable plastic bottle, they pay a small extra fee and get that back by depositing the used bottle at a return centre. Many other countries have similar incentives.But has the intervention actually cut Germany’s use of single-use plastics? There’s little evidence for that, says Antaya March, a researcher at the Global Plastics Policy Centre, which was set up in 2022 at the University of Portsmouth, UK, to conduct independent assessments of plastic-waste management around the world. The scheme did entice people to return their plastic bottles, thus reducing littering. But it was also followed by an unintended increase in single-use bottles, March says — perhaps because people felt reassured that it was fine to buy drinks in plastic bottles that would be recycled.Whether policies such as these help to cut down on plastic use is a crucial question, as the world grapples with growing concerns about the fate of plastics.Of the 8.7 billion tonnes of plastic waste produced between 1950 and 2021, only 11% has ever gone through recycling, according to unpublished estimates by Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (see ‘A tide of plastic waste’).

Source: Ref. 1 and unpublished work by R. Geyer

In 2019, the most recent year for which a breakdown is available, more than two-thirds of the 353 million tonnes (Mt) of plastic waste produced was sent to landfill or incinerated, and 22% (79 Mt) was mismanaged — meaning that it was left as uncollected litter, dumped in unregulated sites on land or in water, or burnt in the open — according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris1. It projects that, by 2060, rising plastic production will lead to a tripling of annual waste to more than one billion tonnes, and that annual plastic pollution (the mismanaged portion) could double, if no new policies are implemented to stem the tide (see ‘Where plastic waste goes’).

Source: Ref. 1

But change could be ahead. Last March, the United Nations Environment Assembly approved a historic agreement to forge a global plastics treaty by the end of 2024. That process will involve hammering out policies and ways to enforce them. Seeing countries agree to seek a treaty covering the whole life cycle of plastics was a very positive sign, says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “I have to say, I’m the most optimistic I’ve been since working in this area for probably 15 years,” she says.Researchers around the world are now working to help cut plastic pollution. The Portsmouth team, Law and many others represent one approach: to investigate the best policies to reduce the production, use and disposal of plastics. Other researchers focus on using technology to improve recycling — or to create new kinds of plastic altogether.All three broad categories of solutions will be needed, says Steve Fletcher, director of the Portsmouth policy centre. “It’s about having a system that works across the entire plastics life cycle,” he says.Assessing the best policiesThe world doesn’t lack well-meaning efforts to cut down on plastic waste. There are bans or taxes on certain types of plastic, such as single-use bags and takeaway containers. There are regulations around how plastic waste can move across international borders, and extended producer responsibility schemes, in which manufacturers are required either to collect and recycle (or responsibly dispose of) their plastics-containing products after use, or to fund those efforts.So far, the Portsmouth team has reviewed more than 130 policies of various types worldwide, on the basis of evidence such as scientific papers, industry reports, news articles and expert opinion.

Antaya March (left) and Steve Fletcher of the Global Plastics Policy Centre at Portsmouth, UK.Credit: University of Portsmouth

Their key finding: in most cases, there was “virtually zero monitoring of policies”, says Fletcher. “That’s quite worrying, because how are we expected to put together a global treaty on combating plastic pollution if there isn’t much evidence around about what works and what doesn’t?” he says.Germany does compile some figures, which show a two-decade rise in the use of plastic bottles. After the deposit system was introduced in 2003, the share of single-use bottles returned under the scheme also rose, while the share of reusable bottles declined. (With rising attention to plastic waste, these trends might have started to reverse, according to a 2022 report in German (see go.nature.com/3macuj5).) A spokesperson for the German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection told Nature that 96.3% of returned bottles are recycled, and that the deposit scheme probably stabilized what would have been a sharper fall in the use of reusable bottles.An example of a policy that has been effective, says March, was a 2016 ban on selling or using plastic shopping bags (with some exemptions) in Antigua and Barbuda. Full data on the effect of this policy weren’t available, but what evidence there is indicates that it led to a 15% decrease in the amount of plastic discarded in landfill in its first year. Several factors contributed to this success, March says, including a clear implementation plan, public support, early stakeholder engagement and enforcement: in this case, a fine of US$1,100 and up to 6 months in prison.March, Fletcher and their colleagues are sharing their work with some of the countries in the UN Environment Programme to inform the plastics-treaty negotiations. “It’s hard to see what shape a treaty could have without any form of monitoring,” Fletcher says.

A waste picker delivers a bag of plastic to a recycling centre in Kenya.Credit: James Wakibia

Well-implemented interventions could have a substantial effect, according to a 2020 analysis by Winnie Lau, director of the Preventing Ocean Plastics project at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington DC, and her colleagues2. By consulting experts and available data, they tried to assess the potential of eight interventions that exploit current knowledge and technologies, including producing fewer plastics, clamping down on the international export of plastic waste, replacing plastics with alternative materials such as paper, and scaling up the capacity of various recycling methods.They found that if no actions were taken, by 2040 approximately 240 Mt of mismanaged plastic waste would be produced each year (a rise from 91 Mt in 2016; Lau’s team gives higher figures than does the OECD). But if all eight interventions were implemented to their maximum potential, as the team assessed it, mismanaged plastic waste would fall to 44 Mt per year by 2040 — a decrease of around 80% compared with the no-action scenario.The take-home message was that the knowledge and technology needed to solve a sizeable chunk of the plastic-pollution problem already exist. “That was a pretty big surprise to us,” Lau says. “We weren’t sure if we could have such a huge impact without thinking about developing new materials or entirely new systems.” But logistics and costs, among other challenges, stand in the way of bringing in these measures to their maximum capacity, she adds.One of the biggest difficulties in implementing policies to cut down on plastics entering the environment is a lack of data on where plastics are produced, used and end up (see also Nature 611, 650–653; 2022). Last September, Lau and her colleagues at Pew, along with several other organizations, launched an effort to build a global plastics disclosure system, which they will encourage firms that want to reduce their plastic consumption and waste to adopt; the system is somewhat analogous to carbon disclosure systems that enable companies to report their carbon footprint.Closing the loop At a facility in Clermont-Ferrand, France, a company called Carbios is testing a technology that it says will form the basis for the world’s first enzymatic recycling plant, which it aims to start building this year and to open in 2025. The plant will use genetically modified enzymes to break down a common plastic called polyethylene terephthalate (PET).The Carbios team hopes that enzymes can overcome some of the shortcomings of mechanical recycling, the most popular method today for repurposing used plastics. This involves first sorting and separating plastics, which are a mixture of different kinds of polymers (long molecular chains); then washing them, and finally grinding or melting them down to produce new plastics. In addition to PET, which is used in fabrics and packaging, some of the other commonly used plastics that can be recycled in this way include polypropylene (PP), used in packaging and construction, and polyethylene (PE) — a polymer that can be manufactured at varying densities and so is found in a wide range of products, from shopping bags and folding chairs to surgical implants (see ‘Types of plastic’).

Source: Ref 1.

Mechanical recycling is sensitive to contaminants such as food and additives, and the process can reduce the length of the polymers, affecting the plastic’s properties (such as toughness or hardness) and its ability to be processed into new materials. This degradation, also known as downcycling, can eventually render plastics unrecyclable.

Mechanical recycling: a worker feeds plastic waste into a crushing machine at a recycling facility in Medellin, Colombia.Credit: Edinson Ivan Arroyo Mora/Bloomberg/Getty

Breaking down plastics with enzymes is one alternative. This can split polymers into their building blocks, or monomers, which can then be used to build plastics with the same properties as the starting material. This makes it possible to indefinitely recycle the plastic, a process often referred to as closed-loop recycling. (Some researchers define ‘closed-loop’ as simply being able to reprocess plastics into other comparable plastic products — even when this cycle cannot be continued indefinitely.)The first reports of enzymes that could degrade plastics date back at least three decades. But the concept received a big boost in 2016, when researchers in Japan reported the discovery of a naturally occurring bacterium that consumes plastics as its sole source of food. This microbe, Ideonella sakaiensis, contains two enzymes that work together to break down PET3.
Plastics tsunami: Can a landmark treaty stop waste from choking the oceans?
The study prompted other researchers to explore plastic-guzzling enzymes. Min Jiang, a biochemical engineer at Nanjing Tech University in China, says his team had focused on finding enzymes that could degrade pesticides, but then added plastics-eaters to their repertoire. Jiang and his team have scoured landfills, forests and oceans to find microorganisms that can break down plastics.One key focus of Jiang’s group has been on developing ways to enzymatically recycle polyurethanes, plastics used in insulation, furniture, shoe soles and other everyday products. So far, the team has identified more than 20 microbes that can degrade polyurethanes—and is studying those organisms’ enzymes in the laboratory, he says.Jiang’s team is also a member of MIX-UP, a consortium of 14 institutions in Europe and China aiming to use microbes both to depolymerize plastics into their constituent monomers (or oligomers — chains of a few building blocks) and to build new plastics. The goal is to use protein engineering to make natural plastic guzzlers faster and more robust, says MIX-UP member Uwe Bornscheuer, a biochemist at the University of Greifswald in Germany, who is also on Carbios’s advisory board. Naturally occurring bacterial enzymes are typically slow, but scientists can modify them to act faster. According to Alain Marty, chief scientific officer of Carbios, a 20-cubic-metre bioreactor can, using the company’s enzymes, degrade 100,000 plastic bottles in 20 hours; its 2025 facility aims to break down 50,000 tonnes of PET a year.

PET plastic flakes and enzymes are mixed together in this Carbios demonstration bioreactor.Credit: Carbios

Despite the explosion of interest, enzyme-based recycling has limitations. The technology remains costly. One 2023 estimate by Gregg Beckham, a chemical engineer at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and his colleagues suggest that enzymatically recycled PET might currently cost around twice as much as the virgin product, and around four times as much as the mechanically recycled one; it also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases than does mechanical recycling4.So far, the enzyme approach seems limited to PET and polyurethanes: two polymers which might be easier to break down because they are not made solely of carbon–carbon bonds. Other plastics, such as polyolefins (polyethylene and polypropylene) and polystyrene, which are held together by carbon–carbon bonds, have been much more difficult to tackle, says Jose Jiménez, a molecular biologist at Imperial College London.
Plastic pollution: Three problems that a global treaty could solve
Enzymes do have an advantage over mechanical recycling, however, because they are highly selective in what they digest. When they work on a PET bottle that includes additives — such as other plastic types, or chemicals for colouring — the enzymes digest the PET and leave the rest, says Marty. That means enzymatic recycling can deal with some plastics that mechanical recycling cannot, and requires a less stringent sorting process. Carbios argues that this will help enzymatic processing compete on cost over time. (For instance, European Union rules will require PET bottles to contain at least 25% recycled plastic by 2025, which Carbios says will cause PET waste to become scarcer and thus raise the cost of sourcing material for mechanical recycling.)Enzyme-based recycling is just one form of chemical recycling, the term for a broader class of techniques that break plastics into their molecular building blocks. Chemical catalysts might be used, too, says Beckham — and many scientists are trying to go beyond just breaking down PET.In a 2022 study, Beckham and his colleagues demonstrated that combining biological and chemical catalysts could be a powerful technique for mixed plastics5. The researchers used a two-step process, including a metal catalyst and an engineered soil bacterium, to degrade a blend of plastics — PET, high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a plastic commonly used in shampoo bottles and milk cartons, and polystyrene, which is used to make styrofoam — into chemicals that could be used to make new polymers. More work is needed before this technology is available for use, says Beckham, such as figuring out the cost and what new plastic it could be used to produce.

Alli Werner at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory tests plastic-degrading enzymes.Credit: Dennis Schroeder/NREL

Another technique sometimes referred to as chemical recycling is pyrolysis, in which mixed plastics are heated to extremely high temperatures in the absence of oxygen until they break down into components that can be used as fuel or for building new polymers. But this labelling is controversial. Critics question whether it can really be considered recycling — because it is often used to generate fuel — and have argued that it is an energy-intensive process that is little better than incineration. Despite these critiques, many large chemical companies are in the process of building pyrolysis plants around the world.Some polymer scientists, such as Michael Shaver at the University of Manchester, UK, argue that even though new recycling methods are important, “mechanical recycling and reuse will always be better in terms of environmental footprint”. So increasing the amount of plastics that are mechanically recycled is crucial, Shaver says, by improving the systems through which plastics are collected and processed at recycling plants. “We can’t chemically recycle our way out of this problem.”Building better plastics For Jeremy Luterbacher, a biochemical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, one solution is going back to the drawing board — and designing a new type of plastic. Luterbacher sees the ideal plastic replacement as having a life cycle akin to paper: minimally modified from the source material, simple to recycle, and with minimal potential for harm if it leaks into the environment.In 2022, Luterbacher’s group reported a way to use chemicals known as aldehydes to turn inedible biological material, such as wood chips and the cobs of maize (corn), into a biodegradable polyester, called dimethylglyoxylate xylose, that he thinks could be this replacement material6. Although the production process is currently proof of concept, it should be possible to make this polyester simply and in large amounts, Luterbacher says.

A bioplastic (white powder) developed in Jeremy Luterbacher’s group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne sits on a mixture of other plastics (such as PET and polyethylene). The bioplastic can be chemically dissolved and recycled without affecting the other plastics.Credit: Lorenz Manker

Luterbacher hopes that staying as close as possible to the original chemical structure of wood, maize cobs or whatever material is used will help to reduce the cost and complexity of this process by reducing the steps needed to get to a polymer. A start-up that he co-founded, Bloom Biorenewables in Marly, Switzerland, is developing this, but there are many steps between idea and commercial product, Luterbacher says. For instance, if dimethylglyoxylate xylose is to be used in food packaging, researchers will need to be sure that, as it degrades, any molecules produced won’t be harmful to health or have any other unintended effects such as leaving a bad taste.“When you’re competing against products that have been developed, in some cases, over 100 years, it takes a lot of resources to catch up,” he says.Like Luterbacher, many researchers are working to develop a new generation of plastics that are often collectively referred to as bioplastics. This umbrella term can refer to any of the bio-based plastics, which are derived from plant-based materials; biodegradable plastics, which can degrade within months in the environment; and compostable plastics, a subset of biodegradable plastics that, among other things, do not produce toxic residues when broken down. (The term biodegradable is itself controversial. Researchers have raised questions about whether such plastics actually break down in the time span manufacturers claim, and have concerns that they might contribute to the problem of microplastics in marine ecosystems.) Because bioplastics don’t rely on fossil fuels as their raw material, their production can also have a smaller carbon footprint than for virgin-plastic counterparts.
Chemistry can make plastics sustainable – but isn’t the whole solution
Currently, the two biggest categories of bioplastics, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) and polylactic acid (PLAs), are both bio-based and biodegradable; they are used in applications including food packaging, cutlery and textiles. Firms are investing billions of dollars into making bioplastics. But they currently comprise only an estimated 1% of the more than 400 million tonnes of plastics produced per year. And when it comes to competing with virgin plastics, bioplastics face limitations.Shaver says that PLA is often brittle, and some PHAs can be difficult to process. He adds that the physical properties of these plastics are often tuned by blending in other materials or using high levels of additives — which it’s important to be transparent about to ensure product safety, especially if these plastics are released to be biodegraded in the environment.It’s also expensive to mass-produce bioplastics, even though they can lead to lower carbon emissions than do virgin plastics. Existing bioplastics, Jiménez says, “are much more expensive than simply getting plastic from oil”.One common way to make PHAs, for example, involves extracting molecules that accumulate in bacteria grown under special conditions — a process that can be costly and hard to scale. Some researchers are trying to boost PHA production by using genetically modified bacteria or even chemicals, rather than microorganisms, to make the bioplastic.Improving plastics design doesn’t only mean going back to the drawing board, says Melanie Bergmann, a marine ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. It can also involve improving on what we already have — for example, by ensuring that products contain just one type of plastic to make them more easily recyclable.A tractable problem? Will humanity be able to find a way through the plastics crisis? Some of the researchers Nature interviewed are optimistic. Bornscheuer, for example, is reassured that so many research teams around the world are working on this problem, and because he sees more media attention and public interest.Bergmann has a less rosy outlook. The many obstacles in dealing with climate change give her little confidence that the plastics problem will be adequately addressed. Still, she sees the UN resolution to create a global plastics treaty as a step in the right direction. “I have great hopes — plastics pollution is a transboundary problem, so we need global action to efficiently address it,” she says.“The plastics pollution crisis is literally visible, and it’s hard not to be heartbroken when you see it in the natural environment, especially,” Beckham says. “I do think that humankind has recognized this problem, and I am hopeful that we can solve this. But it will take monumental amounts of work and time.”

Plastics recycling plant proposed for Susquehanna shoreline

A proposed $1.1 billion plastics recycling plant, shown here in an artist’s rendering, would be located along the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. (Encina)

Is a $1.1 billion plastics recycling plant proposed for Pennsylvania an innovative way to re-use plastics and keep them out of landfills, incinerators and waterways? Or will it help cement society’s reliance on plastics and create pollution concerns for the Susquehanna River?The answer depends on who you ask.
Pennsylvania outcompeted other states to land what Houston-based Encina says will be the flagship for a global network of “advanced recycling” facilities. Over the course of a year, up to 450,000 tons of hard-to-recycle plastics — enough to fill an NFL stadium — would arrive via 80 truckloads a day from materials recovery facilities around the region. The items would include plastic bags, packaging, straws, ice cream and yogurt containers, potato chip bags and more.Then a process called pyrolysis — high heat without oxygen — combined with an unspecified proprietary catalyst, would liquify, separate and purify the plastic’s molecules, the company says. It breaks them down into basic chemicals: benzene, toluene and mixed xylenes.The compounds would be sold and shipped by train to customers who make new plastics that can be used in thousands of products. Potentially over and over. Unlike other advanced recycling plants in the U.S., Encina claims, none of the material would be sold as diesel fuel, synthetic oil or other forms of fossil fuel.“Increasingly, customers are demanding sustainable practices across the product supply chain and life cycle,” said Encina CEO David Roesser. “What we manufacture helps reduce waste, offsets the need to extract virgin resources and helps manufacturers achieve carbon reduction goals.”The company has operated a small-scale demonstration plant since 2016 in San Antonio, TX.

A small-scale plant in Texas has been used by Encina since 2016 to demonstrate plastics recycling technology. (Encina)

To build the Pennsylvania facility, the company has signed a long-term lease on 101 acres in a floodplain on an aggregate mining site along the Susquehanna River in Northumberland County, about 60 miles north of Harrisburg.If it obtains all the necessary permits, Encina hopes to start operations in 2024. So far, one company, American Styrenics, has agreed to buy up to 250,000 tons of recycled resins a year.In March, township officials denied the company’s request for a variance to build its 80-foot-high processing building in a 50-foot maximum height zone. While surprised by the denial, Encina officials expressed confidence it would only be a temporary setback.Former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf celebrated the project when it was announced in 2022.“Not only will they be creating new, good-paying jobs, but they’re committed to doing it with an innovative approach that will lessen their impact on the climate and sustain a brighter future for all of us,” he said at the time.But not everyone sees it that way.
The Encina plant does nothing to address single-use plastics that are the heart of the plastics crisis, said Tamela Russell, founder of the Pennsylvania-based group Move Past Plastic. The $1.1 billion would be better spent creating biodegradable packaging and establishing a re-use model in which plastic products are designed to be collected by manufacturers, refurbished, cleansed and used again.“It’s just going to perpetuate using more plastics,” she said. “And it’s still just taking those environmental contaminants and just recycling them. It’s the same false recycling narrative. It’s not going to stop more production, which we must do.”

A proposed $1.1 billion plastics recycling plant, shown here in an artist’s rendering, would be located along the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. (Encina)

Alexis Goldsmith, of Vermont-based Beyond Plastics, said the pyrolysis process will produce greenhouse gases and emit toxic volatile organic compounds, which she claimed would end up either in the air or water.She also called the Encina project “greenwashing.”“The petrochemical industry sees the writing on the wall,” she said. “In order to divert political will from passing laws to reduce plastic use, they say chemical recycling is the solution. The real solution that we need is to reduce plastics production.” Danny Berard, the mayor of Northumberland, just downriver of the proposed plant, has said there are too many unanswered questions about how microplastics would be kept from entering the river, the extent and management of truck traffic and the financial stability of “a start-up company.” The Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association has not taken a position on the project, but Riverkeeper John Zaktansky expressed concern. “There’s just so many red flags in this situation,” he said. “For one thing, we’re concerned with the massive number of plastics sitting on a site within a floodplain.”He also is dubious about guarantees that PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” would not escape into the river from bales of plastics as they are washed and processed.Zaktansky said his research of other advanced recycling initiatives launched around the country has shown that many run into problems.At a public call-in session with Encina officials in March, residents raised concerns about air pollution, building in the floodplain, microplastic pollution, wastewater pollution and the plant’s water consumption — estimated at up to 2.5 million gallons daily.Encina representatives said modifications would be made to protect buildings from flooding. Water withdrawn from the river would be treated and likely returned with better quality. A membrane bioreactor system would filter plastics from discharged water, and the water would be monitored before releases. None of the materials will contain PFAS, they said.Air emissions would adhere to restrictions set by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. “Anything we are producing will be captured,” Roesser said.Encina officials disagree that the plant enables more plastic production without addressing the heart of the excess plastics problem.“We need a more refined approach where we reduce as much as we can, replace as much as we can and re-use as much as we can,” said Sheida Sahandy, the company’s chief sustainability officer. “But at the end of the day, at least in the short to middle term, there are some critical uses of plastics that none of these alternatives address.”

Where there’s plastic, there’s fire. Indiana blaze highlights concerns over expanding plastic recycling

The dense black smoke from a fire at a plastics recycler in Richmond, Indiana, that began Tuesday afternoon and continued burning on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 nearby residents, was  dramatic, but far from an isolated incident in the world of facilities that store or recycle vast quantities of plastic waste.

There are hundreds of such fires in the United States and Canada every year and most of them never make the news, said Richard Meier, a private fire investigator in Florida who worked 24 years as a mechanical engineer in manufacturing, including in plastics companies.

“These plastics, most of them are derived from oil. They are petrochemicals and they have the same propensity for burning once ignited,” Meier said.

So far, in Richmond, in eastern Indiana between Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio, local health officials say the biggest threat to the public is from breathing particulates in the smoke.

But as firefighters and residents there are now experiencing, the toxic chemicals plastic fires can release also pose significant threats.

“There can be a lot of nasty things that come along with burning plastics. Polyurethane can release hydrogen cyanide,” Meier said, referring to the chemical warfare agent. 

“Dioxins come from burning plastics,” he said, referring to a group of highly toxic chemicals that can cause cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system and interfere with hormones. 

The fire at the plastics recycling plant in Richmond, Indiana, that ignited on Tuesday afternoon. Credit: Ron Oler

“That’s why firefighters wear full respiratory gear when fighting a plastic fire, with an air tank on their back,” Meier said.

On Wednesday, Richmond Mayor Dave Snow told reporters the fire occurred at a plastic waste collection business that city officials have been trying to clean up for several years. 

“We were aware what was operating (there) was a fire hazard,” Snow said. “The business owner is responsible for all this.”

The fire raised new and old concerns about the global plastics crisis that is overwhelming landfills and collection sites, choking the oceans and depositing microplastics inside the bodies and bloodstreams of wild animals and humans alike. Although plastics are ubiquitous in much of modern life, the United Nations and many of its member countries now view them as posing a health and climate threat thoughout their lifecycle, and are working on a plastics treaty in an effort to stop their proliferation and clean them up. 

In Richmond, City Councilman Ron Oler said as much as 70 million pounds of waste plastic was stored inside and outside several buildings on the burning property, which is near a residential area.

He said the plastics there were the hardest types to recycle and had been piling up ever since China stopped accepting most plastic waste —including from Richmond—under a policy called National Sword.

“This guy was buying up scrap plastic and selling it to China,” Oler said. When the China market dried up, so did his business prospects, he added.

But the plant’s owner kept receiving it and storing it, Oler said.

“Our biggest fear has been there would be a fire because there is so much plastic,” he said. Cleanup efforts, however, have been tied up in the courts, he said.

Oler said the fire itself has been terribly disruptive, requiring an evacuation zone of one-half mile, which affected at least 2,000 residents. It could burn for days, officials said.

“This is Richmond’s East Palestine moment,” he said, referring to the Feb. 3 train derailment in eastern Ohio and the controlled release and burning of five railcars of vinyl chloride, a cancer-causing chemical used to make PVC plastic.

At a Wednesday press conference, Christine Stinson, the executive director of the Wayne County Health Department, said air monitoring has revealed the biggest concern to be particulates in the smoke.

“Just standing here, you can see how close we are to the fire, my throat is starting to get a little sore,” she told reporters, several blocks from the charred and burning remains of the recycling business, with smoke still rising as a backdrop.

EPA officials said they will continue air monitoring for particulates and several types of chemicals, including volatile organic compounds, benzene, chlorine and hydrogen cyanide.

China’s National Sword policy rocked global recycling markets, including across the United States.

“I will bet there are almost a hundred of these facilities laying around the United States with giant stockpiles of plastics,” said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental group California Communities Against Toxics. “There is no way to recycle it because it’s not recyclable.”

Since China adopted National Sword, a lot of plastic waste has been sent to landfills or burned in incinerators, said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who has worked as a consultant to the oil and gas industry and now runs The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that fights plastics pollution and waste.

She’s been so concerned about fire threats from old and new stockpiles that she’s been tracking most of those plastic fires that actually do make the news. 

She has counted 70 and mapped their locations in several countries since 2019.

“This is a horrific problem because plastic waste is highly flammable and at these operations, not all of them have proper health and safety management,” she said. “They are sketchy operators.”

With the chemical and plastics industry promoting more recycling, and selling recycling to the public as “clean and green,” plastic fires at  recycling plants illustrate a contradictory and, she said, more realistic image of the industry.

She and other environmentalists say that fires at plastic recycling operations also highlight a threat from the American Chemistry Council’s national push to persuade state legislatures to regulate so-called “advanced recycling” operations as manufacturing and not solid waste management, limiting the need for waste management permits and regulations. 

The industry uses the term “advanced’’ to include recycling processes that convert plastic waste into chemical ingredients for new plastic products or fuel, using high heat and other chemicals. But these advanced recycling plants, which many environmentalists describe as essentially plastics incinerators, also typically stockpile waste plastics onsite. 

In fact, a Brightmark advanced, or chemical, recycling plant in northeast  Indiana experienced a fire in 2021 that also sent a large plume of black smoke into the air, according to a local television station report.

Kansas on Monday became the 23rd state to pass such legislation categorizing advanced recycling as a manufacturing process, subject to far less regulation than waste disposal or incineration, according to the American Chemistry Council. Indiana lawmakers passed their own version of such a law, Senate Bill 472, in March, and on Wednesday the Indiana chapter of the Sierra Club urged Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to veto it.

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‘Toxic’ plastic fire forces 1,000 people to evacuate in Indiana

An evacuation order affecting more than 1,000 people was expected to remain in place through Wednesday around a large industrial fire in an Indiana city near the Ohio border, where crews worked through the night to douse piles of burning plastics, authorities said. Multiple fires, which began burning on Tuesday afternoon, were still ablaze on …

Nearly a quarter of people in the UK flush wet wipes down the toilet

Whether you’re cleaning your house, your car or your child, there are a variety of wet wipes manufactured for the job. Wet wipes are small, lightweight and extremely convenient. They have become a staple in most of our lives, particularly so during and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

But according to Water UK, an organisation representing the water industry, flushing wet wipes down the toilet is responsible for 93% of sewer blockages and costs around £100 million each year to sort out. And the majority of these wipes, about 90%, contain plastic.

Water UK also found that 22% of people admit to flushing wipes down the toilet, even though most of them knew they posed a hazard. And it’s estimated that 300,000 sewer blockages occur every year because of “fatbergs”, with wet wipes one of the main causes.

But it seems wet wipes could soon be banned in England – well, at least the ones that contain plastic – as the government has said it will launch a public consultation on wet wipes in response to mounting concerns about water pollution and blockages. This follows pledges made by major retailers, including Boots and Tesco, to discontinue the sale of such products.

Market projections show that 1.63 million tons of material will be produced in 2023 for wet wipes globally – an industry worth approximately $2.84 billion (£2.04 billion). Though these figures are likely to be on the conservative side as manufacturers increased the production of disinfecting wipes in 2020 during the pandemic – and have remained at the same level since.

Despite the popularity and wide use of wet wipes, not a lot is known about their environmental footprint. This is because manufacturers are not obliged to state what the wipes are made from on the packaging, only the intentionally added ingredients. This creates a challenge for both scientists and consumers alike.

What we know

Wet wipes are made from non-woven fibres that are fused together either mechanically or with the aid of chemicals or heat. The individual fibres can be made from either natural (regenerated cellulose or wood pulp) or petroleum-based (plastic) materials, including polyester and polypropylene.

Most wet wipes are a mixture of natural and synthetic fibres – and the majority contain plastic. As well as the fibres, wet wipes also contain chemicals, including cleaning or disinfecting agents which are impregnated into the material.

Wet wipes can cause a lot of issues for our sewerage system.
JoyImage/Shutterstock

Some wipes are designed to be “flushable” and contain chemical binding agents that are designed to release the fibres of the wipe when they are exposed to water. This means that if wipes are not disposed of correctly, they can create both a plastic and a chemical hazard to the environment.

It’s well known that plastic breaks down extremely slowly and persists for centuries in landfill. And if plastic-containing wipes are released into the environment – either through littering or via the sewerage system – they can pose a number of hazards.

The plastic problem

When wet wipes reach the environment – including soil, rivers and the ocean – they generate microplastic pollution in the form of microfibers. Microfibers are one of the most prevalent types of plastic pollution in the aquatic environment and affect ecosystems as well as potentially human health through their introduction into the food chain.

The problem has been exacerbated by these “flushable” wipes. One study identified seven different types of plastics as potential components of flushable wipes – meaning that they still risk being a source of microplastic pollution. Recent work has confirmed that wet wipes (along with sanitary products) are an underestimated source of white microfibers found in the marine environment.

Data on the environmental impact of the associated chemicals is lacking, but this is something my research group is currently working on. What is known though is that plastics have the ability to absorb other contaminants such as metals and pesticides as well as pathogens. And this provides a way for pollution to be transported large distances through the environment.

Are flushable wipes really flushable?
Shutterstock/nito

Driven by environmental concerns as well as impending legislation, many plastic-free wipe products are now available or being developed. But even products made from natural fibres can still pose a problem to sewerage systems and so safe disposal – in a bin – is key.

The scientific evidence surrounding the environmental effects of bio-based plastics (plastics made from non-petroleum sources such as corn or potato starch) is also lacking, so caution is needed when thinking about simply switching from petroleum-based to bio-based plastics.

With this in mind, reusable washable products are a great alternative to disposables and have a much smaller environmental footprint. They are particularly handy around the home when washing is convenient.

That said, there will remain a market for disposables, but manufacturers should have to clearly label what the wipes are made from so that consumers can make a more informed choice.

New shark-inspired robot can help tackle water pollution

LONDON (WSVN) — A new robot inspired by sharks that eat just about anything, is making waves in the fight against ocean pollution.The autonomous “Waste Shark” is designed to collect trash, debris, and biomass from the surface of city waters. Creator Richard Hardiman explained that the device measures water quality by analyzing parameters such as turbidity, salinity, temperature, PH balance, and water depth.London’s River Thames has a Waste Shark hard at work and is reportedly capable of clearing the equivalent of more than 22,000 plastic bottles a day. Data collected by the United Nations revealed 85% of marine litter is some form of plastic and predictions indicated that by 2050, the amount of plastic in the ocean could outweigh all the fish.The Waste Shark’s ability to stop trash before it reaches the ocean could make a significant impact in reducing this pollution. According to Hardiman, the device can travel up to three miles before it needs to be recharged and can collect more than 1,000 pounds of trash before it needs to be emptied.“Once you empty it, you can put it back in,” he said. “It’s got batteries inside it so, it’s purely electric.”While each machine costs approximately $25,000, the investment could prove valuable in improving water quality and reducing the impact of plastic waste on our oceans.
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