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Sri Lanka has received $2.5 million in the third interim payment for the sinking of the X-Press Pearl cargo ship in June 2021, giving it a total of just $7.85 million for the worst maritime disaster in the country’s history.These payments from the Singapore-flagged vessel’s insurer are mainly to reimburse the government for the cost of the emergency response operations and for direct damages and cleanup.Environmental lawyers say the government can and should pursue a much larger compensation claim for the environmental damage wrought.The X-Press Pearl sank off Sri Lanka’s western coast after catching fire, in the process spilling its cargo of hazardous chemicals and billions of plastic pellets that continue to dot the country’s beaches. COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has received $2.5 million in the third interim payment for the impacts caused by the sinking of the X-Press Pearl cargo vessel off the country’s western coast 14 months ago. This is the third tranche of compensation, but Sri Lankan authorities say a much larger claim for the environmental damage is still to be filed.
The latest payment brings the total paid by the ship’s insurer to $7.85 million. Sri Lanka received $3.6 million in July 2021, shortly after the June 2 sinking that was caused by a fire on board the Singapore-flagged X-Press Pearl, and another $1.75 million in January this year. These payments are mainly to reimburse the government for the cost of the emergency response operations and for direct damages and cleanup, said Darshani Lahandapura, chair of Sri Lanka’s Marine Environment Protection Agency (MEPA).
“The latest receipt will be distributed among 15,032 fishermen belonging to the fishing communities in the three districts of Colombo, Gampaha and Kalutara,” said Susantha Kahawatta, director-general of the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (DFAR).
A cleanup operation in a coastal area in Sri Lanka, where a thriving fishing industry was affected by the X-Press Pearl’s sinking. Image courtesy of the Marine Environment Protection Authority ( MEPA).
International legal battle pending
The sinking of the ship, which was carrying various chemicals and plastic pellets, led to large-scale pollution was reported in the immediate coastal area and was blamed for killing several marine animals. The leak of the more than 50 billion plastic pellets, known as nurdles, made this the worst plastic marine pollution event in the world, prompting the government to impose a fishing ban along a 50-kilometer (31-mile) stretch of the island’s western coast for more than a month. This particularly affected the artisanal fishers in the region, who lost their only source of livelihood during this period.
The X-Press Pearl was carrying 1,486 containers when it caught fire off Colombo on May 20, 2021, and began sinking. Eighty-one of the containers were labeled hazardous, and the cargo included 25 metric tons of nitric acid — a key ingredient in the production of explosives, and touted as a possible factor for the fire. There were several explosions, and it took more than a week to bring the fire under control. Attempts to tow the vessel to deeper waters failed, and the freighter finally sank on June 2, 2021, a few kilometers off Sri Lanka’s western coast, becoming the worst maritime disaster in Sri Lankan waters.
Sri Lanka imposed a fishing ban across a 50-kilometer (31-mile) span of the island’s western coast following the X-Press Pearl’s sinking. Image courtesy of the Ministry of Fisheries.
The sheer scale of the disaster should be reason enough to “fight to get proper compensation for the country,” said  Dan Malika Gunasekera, an expert in maritime law. He cited compensation claims filed by other countries over similar incidents to estimate that Sri Lanka should be able to secure between $5 billion and $7 billion. The inevitable legal battles could be strenuous, as Sri Lanka needs to secure these claims according to international maritime law, which means filing these claims early, Gunasekera told Mongabay.
But more than 14 months since the incident, Sri Lanka has still not filed a claim for the environmental damage suffered, which is being assessed by a panel of experts convened by the MEPA.
“This environmental damage assessment report is now ready and it was submitted to the Attorney General’s Department for instituting necessary actions,” Lahandapura said.
Researchers study contamination of fish due to the marine pollution caused by the X-Press Pearl’s sinking disaster. Image courtesy of the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency (NARA).
Environmentalists push for compensation
The Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ), a local advocacy group, plans to file three lawsuits in the X-Press Pearl case.
“Sri Lanka has not ratified certain conventions which would have helped the island to mount compensation claims for maritime disasters of this kind and of this magnitude,” said CEJ chair Ravindranath Dabare, a prominent environmental lawyer. “CEJ together with other concerned organizations is hence pushing the authorities to take action and filed a case in June 2021 to demand compensation for the affected parties.”
The group is set to file two more cases to ensure the authorities act in a timely manner to secure compensation and completion of the beach cleanup process.
Lahandapura said the MEPA is currently fine-tuning the environmental damage report in consultation with Australian legal experts to ensure the claim stands a strong chance of succeeding in international litigation.
“We cannot unduly expedite the process, as it is an international legal process,” he told Mongabay.
Plastic pellets, or nurdles, from the X-Press Pearl reached Batticoloa on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast, a stark reminder of the extent of coastal pollution caused by the disaster. Image courtesy of Pearl Protectors.
Another compensation case
The case of another ship could indicate how Sri Lanka’s claims over the X-Press Pearl sinking play. The Attorney General’s Department filed a compensation claim for up to $44 million against the Greek owners of the crude oil tanker the New Diamond on Sept. 3 — the deadline for filing such a claim.
The Panama-flagged ship caught fire off the western coast of Sri Lanka on Sept. 3, 2020, while carrying 270,000 metric tons of crude oil and 1,700 metric tonnes of bunker oil. A crew member was killed in the incident, but intensive efforts by the Sri Lankan and Indian navies, as well as two Russian naval vessels that were in the area for joint exercises at the time, managed to prevent the oil spilling and the ship sinking. The New Diamond was eventually towed away to a shipbreaking yard in Pakistan.
The Parliamentary Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) noted that Sri Lanka has since received only $6 million in reimbursement and compensation, out of a potential $44 million that it could claim under the Civil Liability Act. But the claim to this full amount must be filed within two years of the New Diamond catching fire, which was Sept. 3 this year.
Lahandapura said that with the MEPA’s support, the Attorney General’s Department filed the case at the last minute.
As for the wreck of the X-Press Pearl, salvage operations have been handed over to the Shanghai Salvage Company. The ship’s owners, Singapore-based X-Press Feeders, said the salvation operation may take at least another year, and is currently on hold due to rough seas along Sri Lanka’s western coast during the monsoon season.

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At 49 Black Sand Beach, in Honoka‘ope Bay, Hawai‘i, a strange, moat-ringed mound sits in the middle of the beach. This tiny island, made of sand piled about half a meter or so high, was built by a beach shower. Every time a beachgoer steps under the shower to rinse off, water cascades from its base, carving gullies into the sand.
But while the shower’s obvious effect on the beach is mostly benign, it belies a more subtle, and potentially more destructive, consequence.
As new research shows, the water that flows from the shower into the nearby surf is laden with a toxic mix of contaminants—including UV filters, microplastics, and parabens. Scientists who’ve tested the water say that this beach shower, like the thousands of others dotted along coastlines around the world, is a source of pollution that sends chemicals flowing into the ocean at concentrations high enough to cause serious damage to marine life.
The problem, says Craig Downs, an ecotoxicologist at Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia who coauthored the new paper, is that most beach showers are not plumbed into the local wastewater system. Instead, the runoff spills out onto the land and into the ocean.
Swimmers shed copious amounts of sunscreen and other contaminants into the ocean, and scientists have gathered plenty of evidence that these contaminants can harm marine life. But the concentrations of contaminants flowing from beach showers, Downs explains, are startlingly high. Beach showers, says Downs, are point sources of pollution that can cause concentrations of pollution that seriously threaten local corals, crustaceans, and fish. King tides and monsoons can push these concentrations even higher when all of the contaminants built up in the sand are released in one giant pulse.
Because the showers are point sources of pollution, Downs and his colleagues argue that their owners and operators—which are mainly municipalities—could be sued for violating the US Clean Water Act.
Downs, however, would like to see the situation solved more proactively. “We don’t really want to get rid of the showers,” he says. Instead, “what we can do is apply technologies, or legislation, to end [the showers] being a source of pollution.”
Fixing the showers, however, won’t be easy. Plumbing beach showers into municipal sewer systems won’t work: beach sand can clog traditional wastewater treatment systems. Municipal systems also aren’t built to remove such high levels of these contaminants.
There are technologies that will work, though.
One possibility for addressing the high levels of contaminants in beach showers, says Ranil Wickramasinghe, a chemical engineer at the University of Arkansas who wasn’t involved in the research, is to use a membrane bioreactor. This all-in-one wastewater treatment system uses a thermoplastic or ceramic membrane to catch contaminants and allows clean water to flow through. Microbes ingest the contaminants, rendering them harmless. But there’s a couple of catches: setup costs are high and the microbes must be matched to each contaminant.
Another option, says Carlos Martinez-Huitle, an environmental electrochemist at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, who also wasn’t involved in the research, is using advanced oxidation processes (AOP). There are two modes which could be put to use at the showers, he says: direct AOP, where electricity is applied to the AOP cell, enabling its inner surface material to break pollutants down; or indirect AOP, where the current pulls pollutants to one end, while oxidizers form at the other. The oxidizers then transform the pollutants into benign compounds. Municipalities could collect shower wastewater, filter out the sand, and then apply an AOP device to clear pollutants before discharging the water into the ocean, suggests Martinez-Huitle.
AOP is a power-hungry technology, though, so the key is to pair it with a source of renewable energy. In their lab, Martinez-Huitle and his team have developed a system that uses AOP to clean industrial wastewater with electricity supplied by solar panels or wind turbines.
But even the most cost-effective wastewater treatment technology will test meager municipal budgets. Agreeing which one to use, and then implementing it, will also take time.
In the meantime, the researchers are hoping that consumer education, wider use of ultraviolet protection factor (UPF) clothing, and regulations, like Maui’s incoming chemical sunscreen ban, will help stem the flow of pollutants into the environment.
For Downs, now that we know beach showers can be potent sources of pollution that can threaten marine life, the next steps are obvious. “If you can identify a point source of pollution,” Downs says, “then you have the … responsibility to mitigate that pollutant.”

ASHLEY, Indiana—The bales, bundles and bins of plastic waste are stacked 10 feet high in a shiny new warehouse that rises from a grassy field near a town known for its bright yellow smiley-face water tower.

Jay Schabel exudes the same happy optimism. He’s president of the plastics division of Brightmark Energy, a San Francisco-based company vying to be on the leading edge of a yet-to-be-proven new industry—chemical recycling of plastic.

Walking in the warehouse among 900 tons of a mix of crushed plastic waste in late July, Schabel talked about how he has worked 14 years to get to this point: Bringing experimental technology to the precipice of what he anticipates will be a global, commercial success. He hopes it will also take a bite out of the plastic waste that’s choking the planet.

“When I saw the technology, I said this is the sort of thing I can get out of bed and work on to change the world,” said Schabel, an electrical engineer. 

“My job is to set it up and get it running,” he said of the $260 million, 120,000 square foot building and adjacent chemical operations. “Then perpetuate it around the world.”

But the company, which broke ground in Ashley in 2019, has struggled to get the plant operating on a commercial basis, where as many as 80 employees would process 100,000 tons of plastic waste each year in a round-the-clock operation. 

Schabel said that was to change in August, with its first planned commercial shipment of fuel to its main customer, global energy giant BP. But a company spokesman said in mid-August that the date for the first commercial shipment had been pushed back to September, with “full-scale operation…extending through the end of the year and into 2023.”

Even with that new timetable, the plant, located along Interstate 69 in the northeast corner of Indiana, Brightmark faces ongoing economic, political and—environmental critics and some scientists say—technical headwinds.

Its business model must contend with plastics that were never designed to be recycled. U.S. recycling policies are dysfunctional, and most plastics end up in landfills and incinerators, or on streets and waterways as litter. 

Environmental organizations with their powerful allies in Congress are fighting against chemical recycling and the technology found in this plant, known as pyrolysis, in particular, because they see it as the perpetuation of climate-damaging fossil fuels.

“The problem with pyrolysis is we should not be producing more fossil fuels,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the founder and executive director of Beyond Plastics, an environmental group. “We need to be going in the opposite direction. Using plastic waste as a feedstock for fossil fuels is doubling the damage to the environment because there are very negative environmental impacts from the production, disposal and use of plastics.”

Plastics’ Ubiquity 

The global plastics crisis is well documented with annual plastic production soaring from 20 million metric tons to 400 million metric tons over the last five decades. Nearly all are made from fossil fuels and much is designed to resist biodegradation and can last in the environment for hundreds of years, increasingly as microscopic bits that are ubiquitous and have invaded the humanbody.

The amount of plastic discharged into the ocean could reach up to 53 million metric tons per year by 2030, or roughly half of the total weight of fish caught from the ocean annually, according to a December report by a committee of scientists with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The U.S. produces the most plastic waste in the world, nearly 300 pounds per person in a year, the report found. But only a small percentage, less than 6 percent, of plastics used by consumers in the U.S. actually get recycled, a recent analysis of EPA data by Beyond Plastics and the Last Beach Cleanup found.

What does get recycled, such as soda bottles, typically goes through a mechanical process involving sorting, grinding, cleaning, melting and remolding, often into other products. But there are limits to the kinds of plastics that are acceptable for mechanical recycling and how many times these plastics can be re-used in this way.

Chemical recycling, called advanced recycling by the chemical industry— which touts it as almost a Holy Grail of solutions—seeks to turn the harder-to-recycle kinds of plastic waste back into plastics’ basic chemical building blocks. Pyrolysis is among the chemical recycling technologies getting the most attention, with industry representatives saying pyrolysis can turn mixtures of plastic waste into new plastic, fuel or chemicals for making everything from detergents to cars to clothing.

With these plastic wastes, such as grocery bags, cups, lids, containers and films, the industry claims, pyrolysis heats them at high temperatures in a vessel, with little or no oxygen and sometimes with a chemical catalyst, to create synthetic gases, a synthetic fuel called pyrolysis oil, and a carbon char waste product.

It’s a process that’s been around for centuries, used for making tar from timber for wooden ships in the 1600s, for example, or coke from coal for steelmaking in the last century.

Brightmark describes its plant as the “largest-scale pyrolysis facility in the world.” It is designed to take plastic waste hauled in from municipal and industrial sources. The waste is cleaned, chopped up and pressed into small pellets, then fed into pyrolysis tanks and heated by burning natural gas. The synthetic gas created by the pyrolysis process is then mixed with the natural gas to generate temperatures between 800 degrees and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, Schabel said. 

“We flush the molecules out and condense them,” Schabel said, describing what the high heat does to the plastic waste. “We are hitting them with a thermal hammer to break them into pieces. They want to come back together but we control how they come back together.” 

The char is sent to a landfill as non-hazardous waste, he said, and the  pyrolysis oil goes to a small-scale refinery behind the warehouse, where it’s separated into low-sulfur diesel fuel, flammable liquid naphtha, and wax for industrial uses or candles. 

“We call this a hyper-local oil well,” Schabel said on the tour.

But a lot of what comes into the plant gets lost in the process. 

In a document Brightmark filed in December with the EPA, the company acknowledged that just 20 percent of the plant’s output is its primary product—what it described as fuels. Most of the rest, 70 percent, is the synthetic gas that the company said is combusted with natural gas to generate heat, with 20 percent of that syngas burned away in a flare. The rest is the char, according to the filing.

The company now disputes its own numbers, with a spokeswoman saying company officials are working to get them corrected to reflect a larger percentage of output as diesel fuel or naphtha. 

But the EPA filing plays into one of the sharpest criticisms of pyrolysis—that it’s not really plastics recycling at all.

The Brightmark plant in Ashley, Indiana. The San Francisco company plans to turn waste plastic into diesel fuel, naphtha, and wax. Credit: James Bruggers

With pyrolysis, “what you make is what I would call, and I grew up in New Jersey, so forgive me, a dog’s breakfast of compounds,” said University of Pittsburgh Professor Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer with a Ph.D. in polymer science. “It’s like everything you can think of, gases, liquids, solids,” he said.

If plastic waste could be turned only into naphtha, a bonafide building block for plastics, a company could operate what Beckman called a closed loop, and circular system for plastics that could be considered recycling, he said. But that is not what pyrolysis does.

“And this is where it gets controversial,” Beckman said, adding: “because you have people doing this who are saying, ‘We’re recycling it.’ No, you’re not. You’re burning it.” And any time that fossil fuels are being burned, he said, they are emitting greenhouse gas and air pollutants. 

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 plastic waste, agreed.

“The fact that pyrolysis operations have to burn so much of the material to get to the high temperatures is a fundamental flaw,” she said.

EPA Rules Under Review

Brightmark and its expansion plans come as the Environmental Protection Agency weighs how to regulate pyrolysis, with air quality and economics on the line.

EPA regulations now consider pyrolysis to be incineration, which brings tighter clean-air controls. But in the waning months of the Trump administration, EPA proposed an industry-friendly rule change that stated that pyrolysis is not combustion and thus should not be regulated as incineration.

“The appropriate regulation of this is really critical if you want to scale advance recycling, and you want to use more recycled material in your products,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council, a leading lobby for the plastics industry.

Facilities that turn plastic waste into gas and then burn the gas to help generate heat for the pyrolysis process are in effect still burning the plastic, with at least some oxygen involved in both steps in the process, said attorney James Pew, director of the environmental group Earthjustice’s clean air practice. 

“The absolute crux of this issue is whether these new incinerators have to put on controls, like with conventional incinerators, or whether they can skip that and not control or monitor their pollution,” said Pew.

Pressure is mounting on EPA, which, according to a spokeswoman, is gathering public input and still deciding its next steps for pyrolysis and a related technology known as gasification. In mid July, 35 lawmakers including Rep. Jamie Raskin, and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Corey Booker, wrote to the EPA, urging the agency to fully regulate plastic chemical recycling’s emissions and to stop working to promote the technology as a solution to the plastics crisis.

“Chemical recycling contributes to our growing climate crisis and leads to toxic air emissions that disproportionately impact vulnerable communities,” the lawmakers wrote.

Struggling to Meet Its Timetable

At the end of July, Brightmark Chief Executive Officer Bob Powell, in a Zoom interview from his San Francisco office, said the company was still working to iron the last kinks out of its system.

“We have operated it at startup levels,” Powell said. “We’re just now at the point where we’re mechanically complete, and we’re starting to … create those finished products.”

Groundbreaking was in 2019, after the company secured a $260 million financing package that included $185 million bonds through the Indiana Finance Authority, underwritten by Goldman Sachs. Authority officials said the financing is not a state debt and Brightmark will be entirely on the hook to repay them.

The company has struggled to meet its timetable, Schabel acknowledged on the tour of the plant. He said it has taken time to secure an optimal stream of plastic waste for which there was no market, deal with delays caused by the Covid pandemic and navigate the challenges of developing new technology.

Dell said she’s not surprised, adding that she believes that despite the overall abundance of plastic waste on the planet, securing a steady stream of the kind of plastic waste the company has targeted will be an insurmountable challenge. The company has said it will largely recycle mixed, post-consumer plastics, the kind that millions of Americans toss in their recycling bins every week. 

But these wastes are made of many different kinds of plastics, with a range of chemical compositions, and they vary by city and season, she said. Some of the plastics harm the pyrolysis process by introducing oxygenated molecules which reduce yield and lower the quality of the pyrolysis oil output, she said. 

Jay Schabel, president of the plastics division at Brightmark, holds plastic pellets in his hand the company’s new chemical recycling plant in northeast Indiana at the end of July. Credit: James Bruggers

Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, common in consumer product labels, films and packaging, adds chlorine atoms that can cause equipment corrosion and contaminate the pyrolysis oil, she said. Household plastic waste from municipal waste-handling facilities is also contaminated with other garbage that upsets the pyrolysis process, including liquids, food, dirt, paper, glass, metal and polystyrene foam, Dell added.

“There’s this perception that there’s so much plastic waste in the world and in the country, which there is,” Dell said. “And then they hold up this magic plant that they say is going to recycle everything from households all mixed together, and people believe it. But it can’t. It can’t handle the changing variety of household plastic waste and the unavoidable contamination.”

Beckman, the University of Pittsburgh professor, said he was particularly surprised to see the company plans to accept PVC.

“I do not know how they’re taking in PVC, and not getting something you really don’t want,” he said. That could include dioxins or other possible unwanted chlorinated products and more char, he added. 

The EPA considers dioxins to be persistent organic pollutants, highly toxic and potentially cancer-causing.

“There have been people who have looked at this in different ways over the years, asking, ‘What can we do?’ And honestly, what you can do is make sure (PVC) never goes into a pyrolysis unit,” Beckman said.

For his part, Schabel acknowledged taking in mixed plastic wastes can be a challenge but said they can all be handled by the company’s technology, which he described as proprietary. He declined to go into specifics about the proprietary nature of the company’s technology, which was developed by RES Polyflow, the Ohio company he served as chief executive officer before joining Brightmark.

He said the plant can process PVC, but added: “If we pull out more of it, we get a better yield.”

‘Greenwashing Up the Wazoo’

The company, which is also developing manure-to-gas projects across the United States, markets its Ashley plant as a “plastics renewable facility” in an effort to try to position itself as a green solution to global plastics and climate crises. For the Ashley plant, it commissioned a study known in the industry as an “environmental lifecycle analysis” from consultants at Environmental Clarity, Inc.

The report found that, when compared to a typical waste stream in the United States where 17 percent of plastic waste is incinerated, the Brightmark pyrolysis plant produces 39 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than equivalent products made from virgin materials.

The study’s carbon footprint analysis may be true, said Terrence Collins, a professor of green chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the CMU Institute for Green Science. But he said there are too many assumptions built into the study for him to know for sure.

The study was also silent on many other potential environmental impacts that are often included or should be, in any lifecycle analyses of an industrial process, Collins said. 

Its biggest flaw, Collins said, was to give short shrift to the plant’s potential environmental impacts from toxic chemical emissions, including dioxins and common additives to plastics that are known to be endocrine disruptors. Those are hormone-mimicking chemicals that, once inhaled or consumed, can cause reproductive and developmental problems in fetuses.

“I did not see a single measurement for dioxin, or even talking about it,” in the report, he said. “You don’t find endocrine disruption as a term. You don’t find health” mentioned, he added.

“It’s greenwashing up the wazoo,” Collins said of the incomplete lifecycle analysis, combined with how Brightmark markets itself on its website using the children of one of its engineers using plastic toys and talking about the need to stop ocean-dumping of plastics.

“They are proposing to go into a regime of more sustainability technology, and they should be held to task,” Collins said. They are “creating a case for no toxics without the science,” and “having it done by a little kid whose generation will be impacted. If you market through children, you raise the stakes; you really need to prove it,” Collins said.

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Air Date: Week of September 9, 2022

The AES Corporation power plant, shown above, was Hawaii’s last operating coal-fired power plant before it shut down on September 1, 2022. (Photo: Tony Webster, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
This week, Environmental Health News Editor Peter Dykstra and Host Steve Curwood mark the end of coal-fired power in the 50th state (Hawaii) and discuss how 3D printed homes made from recycled bottles could ease both the affordable housing and the plastics recycling crises. In the history calendar, they look back to 1916 when the world’s first self-service grocery store opened and dramatically changed the way we shop.

The St. James Parish Council on Wednesday effectively rejected a bid to allow for industrial development in a neighborhood currently zoned residential, leaving the land’s owner — the South Louisiana Methanol (SLM) company —  on its own to resolve a stalled $2.2 billion project on the site. 

The proposed ordinance would have rezoned a residential neighborhood in the parish’s 5th Council District — a low-income, majority-Black district on the parish’s west bank that is already home to a large number of industrial sites — to a “residential/future industrial” designation. 

The council’s rejection of the change effectively precludes SLM – a joint venture between the New Zealand-based Todd Corporation and a Houston-based subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian company SABIC – from selling the property to any entity with designs for industrial development. 

The ordinance, introduced by Councilmember Donald Nash, never went to a vote, as no council member seconded a motion to consider it. 

Originally announced in 2013, then again in 2019 under reshuffled ownership, the proposed SLM plant would have encompassed 1,500 acres on the parish’s west bank. It was projected to produce approximately 2 million tons of methanol annually, which would have made it one of the largest such facilities in the world. The project would be directly adjacent to Welcome Park, the 5th District’s only public park, which is one of the concerns residents have raised publicly. 

The plant was designed to utilize natural gas in its production of methanol, which is used in a variety of products and applications – ranging from plastics to fuels. The domestic price of natural gas has recently spiked due to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the resulting increase in U.S. gas exports to Europe.

Greg Johnson, an attorney with Liskow & Lewis who addressed the council on SLM’s behalf on Wednesday, said the company has invested $70 million toward the $2.2 billion project, while previous reporting has put the figure at $300 million.  

Because the project was approved before current zoning was adopted, SLM has the right, under parish land use regulations, to build the plant in spite of the residential zoning. But the project has been stalled for years with little work occurring on the site, and the company has allowed some required permits to lapse. 

One of the criticisms raised by the council and by members of the public is that SLM did not articulate a clearly defined vision for what it plans to do with its property now that the original plan appears to be off the table. 

“I’m not seeing a strong effort on the part of South Louisiana Methanol to work with the community or to do things that will make the community safe,” Councilmember Clyde Cooper, who represents the 5th District, said before the motion was considered. “With this situation having run its natural course, I think we need to allow it to run its natural course.” 

Johnson told The Lens after the meeting that the company is reviewing its options, which could include either selling its property or redesigning the project somehow. Johnson did not offer specific details about the future of the property, saying only that the zoning change was necessary so that SLM could explore different opportunities. 

“This land use redesignation is required in order for SLM to pursue new investment partners so that they can position the property for potential projects supporting growth for the parish,” Johnson told council members. “There is not any particular one at this time, but by changing the designation will allow them to explore other opportunities for the property “

One of those opportunities could be to sell the land to another industrial developer. Had the council adopted the zoning ordinance on Wednesday, it would have opened the door for SLM to sell its property as an industrial site, pending the approval of the parish’s officials. But by rejecting it, the current zoning designation for the property stands: treating it as “residential growth” for anyone other than SLM and its $2.2 billion methanol plant. 

That zoning decision was made in 2018, according to the council’s agenda. The parish’s original land use plan from 2014 treated the area as “residential/future industrial,” which residents had publicly opposed. 

For Barbara Washington, a resident of St. James Parish and a founding member of Inclusive Louisiana, a nonprofit focused on environmental justice, the council’s decision was a welcome surprise. 

“We saw humanity there tonight,” she said. “It seemed like all the time that we’ve been talking, they haven’t been listening –  but tonight, it seemed like they were actually listening, and that’s hopeful for us,” she told The Lens. 

‘The clandestine conditions of these meetings’

Meanwhile, the council’s process for considering the ordinance came under scrutiny after two attorneys from the nonprofit environmental legal organization Earthjustice, Corinne Van Dalen and Zora Djenohan, spoke before the parish council two weeks ago. 

They claimed to be in possession of documents showing communications between St. James Parish President Pete Dufresne and SLM CEO Paul Moore about the proposed zoning change. Then on Wednesday, Djenohan said that she was in possession of documents showing that several councilmembers met with SLM leadership in private, which raised questions about whether the councilmembers had violated the state’s open meeting law, and to what extent SLM had the capacity to influence the council’s decision making. 

Earthjustice provided those documents, along with others, to The Lens on Thursday.

The documents show that in July, Dufresne invited Councilmembers Vondra Etienne-Steib, Clyde Cooper and Alvin St. Pierre to a Microsoft Teams meeting with Moore and other employees of SLM, under the subject line “Land Use Discussion.” In a separate email, Dufresne invited Councilmembers Ryan Louque and Jason Amato to meet with Moore and SLM employee Price Howard under the same subject heading. 

In total, a majority of the seven-member council — a voting quorum — was invited to participate in a meeting. Under the law, members of a public body can’t privately meet in a quorum to conduct or discuss public business. 

“The exact attendance and subject matters discussed at each of these meetings remains unclear due to the clandestine conditions of these meetings,” Van Dalen and Djenohan said in a letter to the council. 

“This raises the issue as to whether the Parish violated Louisiana’s open meetings law by privately convening the majority of its Council members over a series of meetings to discuss land use at SLM’s site,” they said. 

Even if separate meetings were held — each with less than a majority of the council — to get around the public meeting requirement, it is also illegal to attempt to circumvent the open meetings law. Environmental groups have previously sued the parish over allegations officials conducted secret meetings with parish council members and members of the parish Planning Commission. Though each meeting was attended by less than a quorum of either body, the attendance of members in those meetings, when combined, constituted a quorum, according to the suit. 

The records compiled by Earthjustice also show that Dufresne sent Moore a draft of the parish’s land use ordinance amendment. Moore responded by stating that he would like for the rezoning ordinance to include more of SLM’s land than originally proposed, and that some of the land SLM committed to using as a buffer should instead be zoned as industrial. 

While “it was SLM’s intent to use a portion of this land for buffer zones, SLM would like to have this land designated industrial so that site use flexibility is maintained,” Moore wrote. SLM was also willing to give up a small portion of the land directly adjacent to Welcome Park, he said.

It appears that at least some of Moore’s suggestions were incorporated in the final zoning change ordinance.

Djenohan told the council on Wednesday that such decisions should not be made in private. At the end of the day, the change could affect the lives of the council’s constituents, and therefore needs to be made in public.

“This is not a decision without consequences, and it needs to be made in the open, in public meetings,” she said. 

For decades, our oceans have been filling up with trash. The North Pacific Garbage Patch, also called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has accumulated approximately 80,000 tons of plastic waste—and that estimate continues to climb. Most of the litter in the ocean is delivered by rivers that carry waste and human pollution from land to sea. But the origins of floating debris in offshore patches haven’t been fully understood. A  recent study published in Scientific Reports has identified one important source of the trash: the fishing industry. 

Between 75 to 86 percent of the plastics floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch come from offshore fishing and aquaculture activities, according to an analysis of the trash collected by nonprofit project the Ocean Cleanup. Major industrialized fishing nations, including Japan, China, South Korea, the US, Taiwan, and Canada, were the main contributors of the fishing waste. “These findings highlight the contribution of industrial fishing nations to this global issue,” says Laurent Lebreton, lead study author and head of research at the Ocean Cleanup. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region twice the size of Texas between the West Coast of North America and Japan, is one of several vortexes in the ocean where waste accumulates. Created by spinning currents, or gyres, each vortex churns and crushes plastics into tiny undegradable bits that are tricky for cleanup efforts to scoop up. Plankton nets are used to collect these microplastics, often no more than 5 millimeters in size, says Lebreton. “But it is currently impossible to retrace an accurate origin for this pollution,” he says. 

[Related: The great Pacific garbage patch is even trashier than we thought]

Since 2018, the Ocean Cleanup has been working to remove less common larger debris, which can sometimes be identified. The team’s approach uses vessels that pull a long U-shaped barrier through the water, guiding the larger plastics into the catch system. “This provided us with a unique opportunity to study larger plastic objects that were not the focus of previous research efforts,” says Lebreton. 

The Ocean Cleanup’s System 001/B, which was the collection iteration used to collect the data in the recent study in Scientific Reports. The Ocean Cleanup

In a 2019 mission, the system pulled up more than 6,000 plastic objects that were larger than 5 centimeters (the threshold for large debris). While a third of the haul was unidentifiable, the research team sorted fish boxes, oyster spacers, and eel traps. This fishing and aquaculture gear was the second most common type of hard plastic collected, making up 26 percent. 

Like the rest of the sectors of our economy, fisheries adopted plastics for its light weight and cheap manufacturing costs. Those plastics can persist for decades.

“We found a fishing buoy dating from the 60s and a crate from the 70s, so this must have been building over time,” Lebreton says, noting that the fishing industry has only expanded since the last century. “More than half the ocean surface is now being fished, increasing the chance of fishing gear being lost, discarded, or abandoned in the ocean.”   

[Related: Humans created an extra 8 million tons of plastic waste during the pandemic]

Generally, the debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been increasing in concentration and in size, according to a 2020 study by the organization. “This would suggest the situation is worsening, which is expected at this stage with an exponential increase in plastic production over the last two decades,” Lebreton says. “This is why it is important to study and identify this pollution so that future inputs can be mitigated.”

The Ocean Cleanup project has an ambitious goal to remove 90 percent of marine plastic waste by 2040. Since last year, the team’s upgraded system plucked over 100,000 kilograms of floating plastics from the ocean; however, marine biologists have expressed skepticism about the efficiency of such cleanup efforts and raised serious concerns these techniques could harm wildlife. Lebreton says that the nonprofit’s efforts should not be a permanent solution: “We want to go out of business eventually.” The best way to decrease plastic waste in these waters is to stop it at the source, he says—cleanup technologies can help pin down the cause and origin of pollution to inform regulation and management. This could include regulating the gear fishing vessels use or how the ships manage their waste, Lebreton says. 

“I trust making this pollution visible [through cleanup efforts] has a significant impact on awareness and also the general understanding of the issue,” he says. “Documenting floating plastic pollution should play a role in the design of mitigation strategies. General public awareness can help in pushing legislation.”

Images and captions from the Ocean Cleanup.

Crates, buoys, lines, and ropes the Ocean Cleanup crew connected back to the fishing industry. The Ocean Cleanup

These black plastic cones are eel traps used for fishing hagfish. The Ocean Cleanup

A haul of crates and boxes. The Ocean Cleanup

A researcher with the Ocean Cleanup analyzes plastic items to find clues to their origins based on language and country codes. The Ocean Cleanup

System 002 in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the most recent collection systems designed by the Ocean Cleanup. The Ocean Cleanup

Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for weekly expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calder’s Travel email Tourists to Venice are being urged to ditch single-use plastic water bottles and drink from fountains, in the latest attempt from local government to cut down on pollution. Tourism is responsible for up to 40 …

Continue reading “Venice tells tourists to ditch water bottles and drink from fountains”

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, masking has been one of the key public health measures put in place to combat the disease. Since March 2020, billions of disposable surgical masks have been used around the world, raising the question: What happens to all those used masks?

As researchers in single use plastic and microplastic pollution, the onset of a global wave of plastic debris pollution became evident to us in the early days of the pandemic — we could see the evidence even during lockdowns when exercise was limited to short daily walks in the neighbourhood. Masks and gloves were on the ground, fluttering in the wind and hanging on fencing.

As ecologists, we were also aware of where the debris would end up — in nests, for example, or wrapped around the legs or in the stomachs of wildlife.

In Canada, a team of researchers led by conservation biologist Jennifer Provencher studied how plastic debris impacts wildlife. In a study conducted during a canal cleanup in The Netherlands, biologists at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center documented that Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) debris would interact with wildlife in the same way as other plastics.

Effects on wildlife

There’s a cartoon circulating on the internet that goes like this: a rat comes home carrying bags of groceries to see two rats laying in bunk beds made from medical grade masks. The rat in the bottom bunk exclaims, “Free hammocks, all over town. It’s like a miracle!”

We shared this cartoon with our colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic, while we were conducting surveys of PPE litter around Toronto streets and parking lots.

We found that within the area that we were surveying — which covered an area of Toronto equivalent to about 45 football fields — over 14,000 disposable masks, gloves or hand wipes accumulated by the end of the year. That’s a lot of rat hammocks.

We set out to understand the breadth of the harm that PPE is doing to wildlife. What we learned is just how many other people were equally concerned.

Jarring images

We conducted a global survey using social media accounts of wildlife interactions with PPE debris. The images are jarring: A hedgehog wrapped in a face mask, the earloops tangled in its quills. A tiny bat, with the earloops of two masks wrapped around its wing. A nest, full of ivory white eggs, insulated with downy feathers and a cloth mask.

Many of these animals are dead, but most were alive at the time of observation. Some were released from their plastic entanglement by the people who captured the photo.

In total, we found 114 cases of wildlife interactions with PPE debris as documented on social media by concerned people around the world. Most of the wildlife were birds (83 per cent), although mammals (11 per cent), fish (two per cent), invertebrates such as an octopus (four per cent) and sea turtles (one per cent) were also observed.

The majority of observations originated in the United States (29), England (16), Canada (13) and Australia (11), likely representing both the increase in access to mobile devices and our English-language search terms. Observations also came from 22 other countries, with representation from all continents except Antarctica.

Weighing costs and benefits

With an estimated 129 billion face masks used monthly around the world, how do we, as ecologists and environmental researchers, tell a global population experiencing a global pandemic to use fewer masks? We don’t.

N95 masks have been essential in reducing the transmission of COVID-19 and, although they are more environmentally harmful than cloth masks, the benefit to health is demonstrably superior.

So, what could we have done better? One thing we noted during our PPE litter surveys is the abundance of discarded masks and gloves in close proximity to public garbage bins.

We hypothesize that a lack of clear messaging from municipalities and provinces about safe ways to dispose of PPE, along with our reluctance to gather near sources of discarded PPE, may have contributed to this global pollution event.

Developing better ways for people to get rid of their PPE waste may help prevent used surgical masks from ending up in the environment.
(Shutterstock)

These are lessons that can still be implemented as we continue to cycle through waves of this pandemic; the use of masks is not yet behind us. Our surveys continue as we track an accumulation of PPE debris that will likely find its way into more nests and tangled around the bodies of more animals.

The rise of single use plastic use due to COVID-19 may not have been avoidable. But the rise in plastic pollution could have been mitigated with some investment in public outreach and modifications to waste management infrastructure to allow for masks and other PPE to be disposed of and processed correctly with minimal leakage to the environment.

In 676 AD the Anglo-Saxon Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne had a lot of things on his mind. His home, the remote Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland, was not the pristine idyll it once was. Poachers had set their sights on the islands’ rare eider ducks. The islands’ residents too were hacking at Farne’s forests with worrying alacrity.  
Cuthbert was adamant that urgent remedial action was required. And so he gathered the islands’ elders to enact the world’s first piece of environmental protection legislation. Poaching was immediately prohibited by statute. Loggers were threatened with imprisonment. And within months the renaissance of the eider had begun.  
The UK has a long history of delivering game-changing environmental policy to protect our most precious flora and fauna. In 1990 the UK Government hosted the renegotiation of the Montreal Protocol – a landmark global agreement effectively ending the depletion of the ozone layer. And in 2008 the UK’s Climate Change Act became the first global legally-binding climate change mitigation target set by a country. 
This leadership is now needed more than ever before to tackle the plastics crisis. Indeed this month a Greenpeace report revealed 100 billion pieces of plastic are thrown away each year in the UK alone. Globally there are up to 75 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean. The plastisphere is now so pervasive plastic is a ubiquitous presence in our bodies, our landscapes, and our aquatic environments.  
In March this year UN member states came to an historic agreement to develop a legally-binding global treaty on plastic pollution. The world has expressed a clear collective ambition to have the detail of the treaty negotiated by the end of 2024 for adoption and ratification the following year. But as with everything in life, the devil is in the detail.  
At the heart of the negotiation will be five international negotiating committee meetings where member states will agree on the scope and design of the treaty. Get it right and the world will have produced a set of tough legally binding measures and targets across the full lifecycle of plastic, capable of being strengthened over time without the need for additional ratification, to turn off the plastic pollution tap once and for all. Get it wrong and the world will have missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle one of the most profound environmental issues of our time. 
The UK has a vital role to play in ensuring the world gets a global treaty on plastic that is fit-for-purpose. That’s why at the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network (OPLN) we’re delighted to be working with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to deliver this.  
Together we’ve created the UK Plastics Treaty Dialogues. OPLN and Defra are set to work with the leading lights of civil society and global business to help shape a treaty that works for all stakeholders. This activist-to-industry network will assemble for six invitation-only meetings over the next two years to build capacity for the UK’s participation in the Global Plastics Treaty. These dialogues will feature some of the world’s most influential business and environmental leaders including Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestle, WWF, Greenpeace, WRAP and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).  
Good policy is rarely created in a vacuum – and the UK dialogues will ensure Britain is well placed to help shape a Global Plastics Treaty that is fit for purpose. I call on the world’s foremost thinkers to join these dialogues to ensure we fulfil the promise the treaty offers.  
For centuries the UK has shown real vision on environmental issues. The UK Plastics Treaty Dialogues will help ensure this spirit of bold leadership continues. There’s not a moment to lose.  

Dave Ford is Founder of the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network 

Footage of men and women covered in black oil, and emerging from a swimming pool, are part of a new international ad campaign to sell more wool.Key points:New wool campaign highlights the eco-credentials of the fibre compared to synthetic fabricsThe ad features people dripping in oil, representing the fossil fuels used to create synthetic clothingIts message contradicts proposed EU sustainability labelling laws which could see synthetics ranked above woolLevy-funded research and marketing group Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) has launched the new ad campaign to highlight the sustainability of wool, compared to synthetic textiles.The ad, which will run in America, the United Kingdom, France and Australia, depicts people swimming in a pool of black oil, struggling to get out.When they do finally emerge, they take off their dripping clothes to reveal clean wool products underneath.AWI said it was based on the insight that “every 25 minutes an Olympic pool’s worth of crude oil is used to produce synthetic clothing, which amounts to almost 350 million barrels a year”.