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South Florida's baby sea turtles are threatened by plastic and light pollution

The sun has yet to peek its way through the clouds on this windy, rainy morning as I ride along the shoreline in a UTV at Red Reef Park in Boca Raton with David Anderson, the sea turtle conservation coordinator for the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.Anderson and his crew come here every morning between March and October to survey sea turtle nesting and hatching activity along this 5-mile stretch of beach.“So leatherback, loggerhead and green sea turtles all make different looking tracks in the sand and it’s pretty easy to discern actually,” Anderson said.WLRN is here for you, even when life is unpredictable. Our journalists are continuing to work hard to keep you informed across South Florida. Please support this vital work. Become a WLRN member today. Thank you.We follow the tracks to a small dip in the sand. Anderson tells me a loggerhead laid her eggs here last night. He marked the nest by surrounding the perimeter with orange wooden stakes and tape, then labeled it with today’s date.“This turtle nest hatched,” Anderson said. “We give each nest three days or 72 hours for the hatchlings to get out on their own. And then we come back and excavate the site.”

Yvonne Bertucci zum Tobel

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WLRN A baby loggerhead sea turtle was found while excavating a nest.

While digging out the nest with his hand, Anderson finds a live baby loggerhead.“The purpose of us excavating nests is to evaluate the hatch success of the nest and see how successful our nests are here on the beach but the bonus is we often find live baby turtles in the nest and those get a second chance,” Anderson said.This baby turtle will get its second chance tonight — at a hatchling release organized by the nature center. Tickets were sold out months in advance.Cerridwen Canens lives near Orlando. She bought her ticket in May.“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine, I’ve always wanted to do this so it’s pretty special to have the opportunity. I’m pretty happy,” she said.Before the hatchlings are released, I join 18 other guests in a classroom at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center. The 20-acre property in Boca Raton has been promoting sea turtle awareness since 1984, through environmental conservation, research and education.During the presentation, Anderson tells us about the three types of sea turtles they find along their beaches — green, loggerhead and leatherback. Anderson says to stay away from single-use plastics. Microplastics make their way into the ocean and get stuck in sargassum seaweed, where baby turtles take shelter for the first several years of their lives. The seaweed provides food and camouflages them from predators.“Hatchlings, when they go offshore, are very opportunistic feeders,” Anderson said. “They’ll pretty much eat anything in front of their face that looks appetizing, that looks delicious. And you can imagine a tiny, colorful piece of plastic in front of them they will consume. They will also consume plastic bags or shopping bags because those floating in the ocean look like what? Jellyfish.”Once hatchlings make it to the ocean, they swim 15 miles offshore until they reach the sargassum seaweed mats.Every single hatchling Anderson and his crew find washed up along the shore has plastic in its belly.

Yvonne Bertucci zum Tobel

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WLRNArtificial light pollution from cities confuses baby sea turtles. This photo was taken at Red Reef Park looking north. The ocean is on the right (east) and the light is coming from above the dunes to the west.

For millions of years, hatchlings have crawled toward the ocean. But that’s changed. Florida’s growing coastal population means more artificial light at night. Many cities and residents opt for LED lighting, because it’s more cost effective. But the light is so bright to a sea turtle, that it can seem like the ocean’s horizon.“It’s more difficult to address the bigger problem, which is artificial light pollution from inland, because you go out on the beach at night and you see this massive glow in the sky and unfortunately, sea turtle hatchlings are attracted to that glow because they think that is the horizon over the ocean,” Anderson said.In Boca Raton, there are lighting ordinances along A1A, but less than one-fourth of a mile from the beach, street lights brighten the night sky. Anderson said cities and homeowners should use amber-hued light bulbs and lighting fixtures that point down, not up into the sky.At 9:30 that night, we make our way out to the beach … the 180 active sea turtles they gathered that morning are in buckets.

Photo courtesy of the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center

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A nighttime hatchling release organized by the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.

We approach the shoreline and release the hatchlings. Only one in a thousand of these babies will make it to adulthood.Cerridwen Canens is standing at the shoreline, the waves washing up against her legs. She looks out into the ocean and tells me she’ll be coming back again next year.“It’s like that really ancient connection to a part of myself that’s lived you know, a thousand lifetimes and it’s the closest feeling I can describe to home really, I just, I needed this, it was really a very special experience,” she said.

Yvonne Bertucci zum Tobel

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WLRNOnce excavated from the nest, the baby sea turtles are placed in a bucket for release later that night.

Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down – and we keep making more | Kim Heacox

Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down – and we keep making more Kim Heacox Americans throw away an estimated 2.5m plastic water bottles an hour. We need international cooperation to protect our planet and our health Every great movie has at least one scene that stays with you. In the 1967 classic …

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‘Spiderwebs’ to the rescue for Indonesia’s coral reefs

A small-scale project in Indonesia is seeing success in efforts to restore coral reefs damaged by blast fishing.Lightweight cast-iron rods form underwater “spiderwebs” that are placed onto existing reefs, with new coral grafted onto the structure.Proponents of the project say the benefits are already tangible, but add that to make them last, there needs to be an end to destructive fishing practices. Ultra-strong fibers, multi-legged robots, pain relievers — all are human innovations inspired by spiders.
Now, conservationists in Indonesia are rehabilitating coral reefs using what’s known as the coral spider technique.
The method is a type of reef restoration project involving the installation of man-made “spiderwebs” onto which new corals are grafted. It entails placing small, lightweight rods “made from cast iron that is welded into a hexagonal shape, like a spider web,” Imam Fauzi, head of the National Aquatic Conservation Center (BKKPN) in Kupang, a port city on the island of Timor where one such project is underway, told Mongabay.
Indonesia has one of the most extensive coral reef systems in the world, but more than a third is in poor condition, according to a 2018 study. Much of the damage is due to warming oceans, blast fishing, plastic pollution, and severe storms.
Clean-up day at Oesina Beach, West Kupang, Indonesia. Image by BKKPN Kupang.
The spider technique was previously deployed in Indonesia under a project backed by food giant Mars in which thousands of “coral spiders” were installed off the islands of Sulawesi and Bali.
At Oesina Beach in Kupang Bay, conservationists are installing spider frames. The six-sided structures have three top beams spanning 54 centimeters (21 inches) each and six 36-cm (14-in) side beams. The frame is latched onto the reef with plastic cable ties.
The practice is low cost, materials are readily available, construction is easy, and getting the material to the rehabilitation location doesn’t require great effort, Imam said.
“On average, transplanted coral with this method can grow well if maintenance and cleaning are routinely conducted,” he said.
BKKPN Kupang started using the spider technique in 2019 on the islands of Sabu (Sawu) and Raijua, west of Timor. Within its work scope, the center has done rehabilitation jobs in the provinces of West Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua.
Rehabilitation of coral reefs in commemoration of Coral Triangle Day 2022 in Oesina Beach. Image by BKKPN Kupang.
Currently, BKKPN Kupang is teaming up with two locally based units of national companies and YAPEKA, a conservation nonprofit, to rehabilitate the coral reefs of Oesina Beach. The damage there is due to blast fishing and poison fishing, Imam said.
The center has placed 150 spiderweb units covering 150 square meters (about 1,600 square feet) of reef, he said.
YAPEKA began work in Kupang Bay in October 2021 after Tropical Cyclone Seroja hit the area in April that year. The NGO started with 700 finger-long coral fragments secured by 50 spiderweb units covering a 0.2-hectare (0.5-acre) expanse. It has now expanded to 0.4-0.6 hectares (1-1.5 acres).
YAPEKA has installed 200 spiderweb units in one location in collaboration with PLN, the state-owned electricity company, which operates a coal-fired power plant in the bay area.
“If it evolves well, in three or four years it can become a coral garden allowing for underwater tourism and a source for adopting coral fragments for other locations [needing rehabilitation],” YAPEKA East Nusa Tenggara field coordinator Fredik Ngili told Mongabay.
Children take part in a clean up event in commemmoration of Coral Triangle Day. Image by BKKPN Kupang.
YAPEKA has also set up an ecotourism information center on the beach, where tour guides are trained.
The coral garden area can be enlarged beyond Oesina Beach to cover other locations in the waters of Kupang Bay, Fredik said. He emphasized the need for community education on using environmentally friendly fishing gear as a way to preserve healthy coral reefs. There should also be an end to littering in the sea, especially plastic waste, and a campaign to spread the message about the benefits and functions of coral reefs, he added.
Imam agreed, adding that people shouldn’t overuse the benefit of coral reefs. He also called for safeguarding the health and quality of the water. He said boats shouldn’t drop anchor in coral reef zones and spiderweb units shouldn’t be installed on living coral.
Among the beneficiaries of the coral reef rehabilitation efforts are the inhabitants of Lifuleo village by the beach. “Fish development has increased income,” village head Zwingli Say told Mongabay.
Banner image: Rehabilitation of coral reefs in commemoration of Coral Triangle Day 2022 in Oesina Beach. Image by BKKPN Kupang.
A version of this story was reported by Mongabay’s Indonesia team and first published here on our Indonesian site on June 14, 2022.

Biodiversity, Community-based Conservation, Conservation, Coral Reefs, Ecological Restoration, Environment, Fish, Fishing, Habitat Destruction, Innovation In Conservation, Marine, Marine Conservation, Marine Ecosystems, Oceans, Overfishing, Restoration, Saltwater Fish
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‘Incredibly promising’: the bubble barrier extracting plastic from a Dutch river

‘Incredibly promising’: the bubble barrier extracting plastic from a Dutch river Technology applied to Oude Rign river helps stop plastic pollution reaching sea Five years ago, Claar-els van Delft began to suspect that plastic waste on the beach at Katwijk in the Netherlands did not come from visitors, or the sea, but from the mouth …

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This company is turning plastic trash into construction blocks

Imagine taking heaps and heaps of earth-polluting, unusable plastic waste and actually transforming it into something constructive?Plastic pollution is a proliferating and increasingly overwhelming problem. By 2040, estimates indicate that as much as 710 million tons of solid plastic waste will clog up the earth’s ecosystem, in oceans, rivers and on land.Los Angeles-based startup ByFusion has a plan for that waste. In fact, the business has created a system to collect the most troublesome type of plastic trash — the stuff that can’t be recycled.Founded in 2017, the company has developed a machine that turns single-use plastics into something called “ByBlock.” Similar in size and shape to the concrete blocks commonly used in construction, ByBlocks are made entirely of reclaimed plastic waste.”You’d be astounded at the things that cannot be recycled, which is basically everything you touch … stuff like pens, toothbrushes,” ByFusion’s CEO, Heidi Kujawa, told CNN Business. “The interesting thing about our technology is we specifically, entirely designed our system around the low value, no value stuff, everything that can’t be recycled.”As she researched plastic waste, Kujawa learned that there are seven types of plastic, of which only two can be recycled. “In the past it used to go to China and other places that would buy it from us,” she said. “That dried up in 2017. Since then, we’ve been burning or burying that plastic.”ByFusion’s machine, called the Blocker System, converts the discarded waste into building blocks without having to sort or pre-wash them, a major obstacle in the plastic recycling process.After collecting the waste, it takes only minutes to shred the plastic is shredded and fuse it into solid blocks using steam and compression. The blocks are made without additives or fillers — 22 pounds of plastic create 22 pounds of ByBlock bricks.”We’ve modeled our ByBlocks around the dimensions of a hollow cement block. Each is a 16 inch by 8 inch by 8 inch unit,” said Kujawa, and each brick is about 10 pounds lighter than a standard cement block.A cement block has rebar running through it, but ByBlocks uses a method called post tensioning, which requires a steel rod. As a sustainable option for building material, the repurposed plastic can be used for commercial, residential and infrastructure projects, Kujawa said.To that end, the business wants to partner with local governments, municipalities and corporations among other entities. It’s already selling both its Blocker System and completed ByBlocks but declined to specify customers or sales numbers thus far.”From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to be as carbon neutral as possible. So our block, our systems and our manufacturing process is an all electric, no emissions process today,” Kujawa said.The ultimate goal, she said, is to take the Blocker System to communities worldwide and enable them to repurpose plastic waste for use in local building projects. ByFusion hopes to be able to recycle 100 million tons of plastic by 2030.”Every community struggles with plastic waste,” Kujawa said. “Putting in a Blocker is going to help reduce landfill, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce transportation needs, all of that other good stuff.”

LOS ANGELES — Imagine taking heaps and heaps of earth-polluting, unusable plastic waste and actually transforming it into something constructive?Plastic pollution is a proliferating and increasingly overwhelming problem. By 2040, estimates indicate that as much as 710 million tons of solid plastic waste will clog up the earth’s ecosystem, in oceans, rivers and on land.

In world first, Chile to ban single-use F&B products over three years

In May 2021, Chile announced a legislative ban on single-use products in the food and beverage industry to take effect over the next three years.Similar bans in other countries and cities also address the crux of the plastic pollution problem — the disposable culture — but Chile’s ban extends to other materials too, including cardboard and poly-coated paper.In the lobbying process, the Chilean plastics association raised some concerns about the intricacies of the ban, but said it was ultimately “satisfied with the outcome.” New legislation passed by the Chilean government in May 2021 aims to rid the nation of all single-use products in the food and beverage industry, including plastics, within three years. This is the first national-level legislation in the world to implement a ban on single-use F&B products, such as those made of plastic, cardboard and other materials, as opposed to targeting single-use plastics alone. It also follows Chile’s 2019 ban on plastic bags, which received some criticism for people swapping out disposable plastic bags for disposable paper ones, or overcollecting reusable bags.
Chile produces nearly 1 million metric tons of plastic trash a year, but recycles just 8.5% of it, according to a 2019 report by InvestChile. In comparison, Europe has a recycling rate of about 30%, according to another 2019 report by Hamburg-based research firm Statista.
The new legislation will significantly reduce Chile’s plastic waste while boosting the nation’s plastic recycling rates, experts say. This law is projected to eliminate an estimated 23,000 metric tons of single-use plastic pollution annually — the weight equivalent of 116 blue whales, according to a 2020 report by the NGO Oceana Chile.
“The plastic industry now realizes that we are not targeting plastics specifically, but the unnecessary use of single-use items,” Javiera Calisto, legal director of Oceana Chile, told Mongabay. Oceana Chile and its partner organizations were the teams responsible for the proposal and lobbying of this new bill over the past three years.
The law aims to reduce waste generation in three key ways: eliminating single-use products in the food and beverage industry, certifying plastic products, and regulating the use and composition of disposable plastic bottles.
“The law establishes different terms for the respective obligations to come into force. Since we’re making important changes, it was very important to be realistic,” Calisto said.
Chile produces nearly 1 million metric tons of plastic trash a year, but recycles just 8.5% of it, according to reports. Image by Chris Hunkeler via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
According to Oceana, plastic tableware such as straws, cutlery and stirrers will be banned from all eating establishments six months after the law is enacted. Other changes will have up to three years to come fully into force. This includes a requirement that at least 30% of bottled drinks in supermarkets must come in reusable bottles.
Other places in the world have taken similar action as Chile by taking a “hard measure” approach to eliminating single-use plastics. For instance, New York City, California, Hawai‘i, Kenya and the European Union have all banned single-use plastic bags in recent years.
As of July 2018, 127 out of 192 countries have adopted full or partial bans against plastic bags, while 57 countries have imposed a plastic bag tax on either the producer or consumer at the national level, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme.
But these legislations are far from perfect. Common criticisms against increasingly popular plastic bans include the fact that they harm poor nations and people the most, and merely encourage the uptake of equally harmful alternatives. This was the case when Chileans began amassing huge amounts of reusable bags following the countrywide ban on plastic bags in 2019.
Chile’s newest law will apply to single-use products including plastic utensils, poly-coated paper cups, disposable cardboard trays and single-use chopsticks, as opposed to single-use plastics alone. Single-use products have been defined as any F&B utensil that is not “used by the establishment on multiple occasions in accordance to their design,” regardless of the material they’re made of.
Chile’s newest law will apply to single-use products including plastic utensils, poly-coated paper cups, disposable cardboard trays and single-use chopsticks, as opposed to single-use plastics alone. Image by Brian Yurasits via Unsplash.
Change in the works
Under this legislation, restaurants that fail to comply can be fined up to around 327,000 Chilean pesos ($360) per product, and supermarkets can be fined 1.3 million pesos ($1,435) per reported case.
Some establishments have already made the switch to reusables. At Mallplaza Egaña, a shopping mall, reusable cutlery and utensils such as including plates, cups and stirrers have replaced all single-use plastics in its food gardens.
Antonio Braghetto, operations manager of the Mallplaza mall franchise in Chile, told Mongabay in an email that the legislations imposed in Chile in recent years have helped “mobilize organizations” along the path to a zero-waste economy.
The new law might also prove crucial in finally addressing the carbon footprint of the plastics industry.
For instance, the law requires that disposable plastic bottles in Chile must be composed of a percentage of plastic that has been collected and recycled within the country. The Ministry of Environment will enforce and regulate this process through a plastic certification process. However, the exact percentage, or what qualifies as “recycled” material, is unclear.
Plastic manufacture is often overlooked as a significant source of carbon emissions. For example, in the U.S., plastic manufacturing is expected to overtake coal plant emissions by 2030. At the same time, recycling rates have never surpassed 9% in the U.S., and plastics companies have been found to overstate the feasibility of recycling plastics since the 1970s, Mongabay previously reported.
“Only upstream measures such as a cap on plastic production will prevent further degradation of our life-supporting ecosystems,” Melanie Bergmann, a plastic pollution and microplastic expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, said in a previous Mongabay article.
Some establishments have made the switch to reusable cutlery and utensils such as including plates, cups and stirrers in the place of single-use plastics. Image courtesy of María Jose Arancibia/Mallplaza.
The plastic prerogative
An estimated 12 million to 14 million metric tons of plastics enter the ocean every year, according to the IUCN. It’s not known what proportion of this can be attributed to single-use plastics, though these are the “most visible” forms of pollution, IUCN plastics expert Joao Sousa told Mongabay in an email.
Yet, plastics also have their benefits, Sousa said. Their cost-effective, durable, lightweight and waterproof nature is precisely what makes plastics so versatile and lucrative.
This time, the Chilean Plastics Association (Asociación Gremial de Industriales del Plástico de Chile, or Asipla for short) was part of the meetings held with the Chilean senate and other officials for the drafting of Chile’s newest law against single-use plastics.
“Even though we were 100% conscious about the impact of plastics on the environment, we also are convinced of the many undeniable advantages that plastic has given society since its existence,” Magdalena Balcells, general manager of Asipla, told Mongabay.
Without plastics, for example, the world wouldn’t have the face masks (N95 masks are made from synthetic plastic fibers) or medical equipment necessary for managing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Seventy-five percent of the waste found on Chile’s beaches is plastic litter. Image courtesy of Javiera Castilo/Oceana.
“We all want to have fewer residues in the world — it’s not just plastic, but glass, paper, cardboard, and aluminum. But if it’s unfeasible, we are not doing any favors to the environment,” Balcells added when asked about Asipla’s experience being included in Chile’s bill-drafting process this time around.
The various parties “had their differences,” Balcells said. Proposals to ban the production of PET bottles altogether or to deem all forms of packaging as single-use materials were floated, but ultimately ruled unfeasible. But the parties involved eventually met in the middle.
“We are very satisfied with the outcome,” Balcells said. “Though the scope is not huge, it is visible enough for people to change their habits. And that’s a very good thing.”
Banner image: A neighborhood store in Chile with a sign proclaiming they are no longer delivering plastic bags. Image by LuisCG11 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Citations:
Oceana Chile. (2020). Estimación de la disminución de desechos plásticos de un solo uso producto de su regulación. Retrieved from https://chile.oceana.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/informe_plasticos_digital.pdf
Statista. (2019). The plastic dilemma: 348 million tons of plastic produced per year worldwide, half of which becomes waste. Retrieved from https://mailchi.mp/statista/plastic-waste-dossierplus?e=c7c3bf2bc7
Taylor, R. L., & Villas‐Boas, S. B. (2016). Bans vs. fees: Disposable carryout bag policies and bag usage. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 38(2), 351-372.
UNEP. (2018). Legal limits on single-use plastics and Microplastics: A global review of national laws and regulations. Retrieved from https://www.unep.org/resources/publication/legal-limits-single-use-plastics-and-microplastics-global-review-national

Conservation, Environment, Environmental Law, Environmental Policy, Green, Interns, Law, Oceans, Plastic, Pollution, Sustainability, Water Pollution
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As India bans disposable plastic, Tamil Nadu offers lessons

Tamil Nadu’s ban on single-use plastic has gotten results, thanks to relentless policing. Now, India says it will tackle the problem nationwide.CHENNAI, India — Amul Vasudevan, a vegetable hawker in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, thought she was going to go out of business.The state had forbidden retailers to use disposable plastic bags, which were critical for her livelihood because they were so cheap. She could not afford to switch to selling her wares in reusable cloth bags.Tamil Nadu was not the first state in India to try to curtail plastic pollution, but unlike others it was relentless in enforcing its law. Ms. Vasudevan was fined repeatedly for using throwaway bags.Now, three years after the ban took effect, Ms. Vasudevan’s use of plastic bags has decreased by more than two-thirds; most of her customers bring cloth bags. Many streets in this state of more than 80 million people are largely free of plastic waste.A shopper at a market in Chennai. As people have gotten used to providing their own shopping bags, plastic use has gone down.Anindito Mukherjee for The New York TimesYet Tamil Nadu’s ban is far from an absolute success. Many people still defy it, finding the alternatives to plastic either too expensive or too inconvenient. The state’s experience offers lessons for the rest of India, where an ambitious countrywide ban on making, importing, selling and using some single-use plastic took effect this month.

Tiny turtle pooed ‘pure plastic’ for six days after rescue from Sydney beach

Tiny turtle pooed ‘pure plastic’ for six days after rescue from Sydney beach Green sea turtle hatchling was missing a flipper when it was found lying on its back in a rockpool and taken to Taronga zoo ​​Get our free news app, morning email briefing and daily news podcast A baby green sea turtle rescued …

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'It's in the water you drink', how ocean plastic pollutes the Earth

Humanity’s impact on the environment has never been more prominent, with a recent government report finding increasingly more severe weather events and less biodiversity.
But one environmental issue, recently named by the UN as one of the world’s biggest problems along with climate change, has flown under the radar.
Tens of millions of tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year, either washing onto coastlines or accumulating into giant ocean garbage patches, where they can spend decades breaking down into toxic microplastics that are next to impossible to remove.