Microplastics could be harming unborn babies, concerning new research has found.
Large polystyrene particles – around the size of a cloud or fog droplet at 10 micrometres – can make their way into the placenta, according to scientists at Utrecht University.
Presenting her research at the Plastic Health Summit in Amsterdam last week, lead scientist Hanna Dusza said more work is urgently needed to determine what effect the tiny pieces of plastic are having on foetal health.
Microplastics are tiny plastic particles less than 5 millimetres in size. They are found in numerous products – including toothpaste, shampoo and drug capsules – and created when bigger plastic objects break down.
The research also found that plastic particles can become a vector for other chemicals, effectively carrying them into the womb.
This could expose the foetus to a raft of dangerous pollutants, including PCBs: a group of manmade chemicals once widely used in industrial processes, and still contaminating the environment even after they were banned in Europe in the 1980s.
Could microplastics have a similar impact to air pollution?
The placenta is a temporary organ that develops in the uterus during pregnancy, and enables oxygen and nutrients to pass from the mother’s blood to the baby through the umbilical cord.
Scientists have already found that air pollution particles breathed in by the mother can penetrate the placenta during these vital exchanges, leading to premature births, low birth weights and lifelong health conditions for newborns in some cases.
As Dusza, an environmental toxicologist explains, “Recent studies have shown that microplastics are also detected in the placenta, though their effects are unclear.
“Our research shows that plastic particles of different sizes are efficiently taken up by placenta cells, where they may exert subtle effects on endocrine function.” This function of the placenta is to produce hormones which control the foetus’s growth.
Dusza has developed a new method for the detection of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the human amniotic fluid.
The dangerous effects of plasticising chemicals on reproduction
The Summit, organised by NGO Plastic Soup Foundation, also heard from Professor Patricia Hunt of Washington State University in the US.
When Prof. Hunt accidentally exposed her laboratory mice to BPA, an industrial chemical, in the late nineties, her focus was drawn to the effects of common environmental contaminants on reproduction.
On Thursday she revealed that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in microplastics have the potential to harm the foetuses of pregnant mice.
“Chemicals used in plastics not only have the potential to harm our fertility, but also to affect future generations,” she said.
“Linking maternal and foetal exposure to birth outcomes, development, and adult disease would convince even persistent doubters of the harmful effects of plasticising chemicals.
“But we don’t have the luxury of time. We must put faith in experimental evidence and ensure that our estimates of human exposure are accurate.”
How to avoid ingesting microplastics
Microplastics are everywhere – from the bottom of the ocean to the shellfish we eat, and Arctic snow to the beers we drink – so it’s impossible to avoid them altogether.
But there are things you can do to limit your exposure while at home, such as wearing more clothes made of natural fibres. That’s because synthetic garments shed microfibres – which you can also tackle with a washing machine filter.
Naturally, many of the recommended tips for filtering out microplastics from your life also involve cutting down on single-use plastics like water bottles, tea bags lined with plastics, take-away cups and plastic-packaged ready meals.
A non-plastic kettle may be worth investing in too – especially for cleaning baby bottles, researchers at Trinity College Dublin have suggested.
Microplastics are tiny fragments of degraded plastic, no greater than 5 mm in diameter. They are oceanic pollutants that can drift thousands of miles in the surface layers of the open sea and can also find their way down the water column to various depths.
While studies to measure and monitor the presence of microplastics in regions of the world’s oceans have been conducted for the past 50 years, they have made use of disparate methods of collection and analysis, meaning that the data could not be combined or compared easily. Large data sets to help follow the trends in microplastic pollution have thus not been available to researchers in general.
This is what prompted a global team of oceanographers, led by researchers from Kyushu University, to review the data from previous published and unpublished expeditions to sample microplastics in the oceans. They calibrated and processed these data in order to build a publicly available dataset for assessing trends in the abundance of microplastics more accurately.
“Although the observation of microplastics dates back to the 1970s, standardized data spanning the globe is still limited,” explained Atsuhiko Isobe, professor at Kyushu University’s Research Institute for Applied Mechanics.
To create the new dataset, a total of 8,218 pelagic microplastic samples, collected from oceans around the world, were synthesized and standardized. The data set contains raw, calibrated, processed, and gridded data that is now comparable. Samples were adjusted for different types of collection, as well as for conditions of ocean turbulence and wind, as these factors affect estimates of abundance.
“We collected published and unpublished data on microplastic distribution from around the world and calibrated to account for differences such as in collection method and wave height to create standardized, state-of-the-art 2D maps of microplastic abundance,” explained Professor Isobe.
The researchers estimated that there were 24.4 trillion pieces of microplastics in the world’s upper ocean layer, which equates with somewhere between 82,000 and 578,000 tons of plastic, or roughly 30 billion 500 ml plastic water bottles.
“Our dataset provides realistic amounts of microplastics in the wild to help researchers trying to assess the true impact they are having on aquatic organisms and the environment,” said Professor Isobe.
“While this work improves our grasp of the actual situation, the total amount of microplastics is still likely to be much greater since this is just what we can estimate on the surface. For us to get a clearer picture, we must develop 3D maps probing the depths of the oceans and continue to fill the gaps within our dataset.”
“Though we are making progress, we still have much to learn to get a complete picture of the fate of plastic debris and the effect it is having on the environment.”
Is anyone really, truly surprised that President Biden’s relatively ambitious plan to address climate change is being axed so quickly from his infrastructure package?
A poll this month by Cambridge University found less than fifty percent of citizens in seven Western European nations were willing to accept major changes like outlawing gasoline or diesel vehicles or restrictions on meat-eating diets.
In the U.S., several polls earlier this year found a huge partisan gap in whether or not climate change was a serious problem at all: Among Democrats, 75 percent found the problem urgent enough to require immediate action; 21 percent of Republicans thought so.
In a Gallup Poll last year, 23 percent of Americans reported eating less meat than the year before, but the predominant reason was health of their innards, not the health of their environment. McDonalds can cite billions and billions of reasons why cattlemen can sleep safely for many nights to come.
Office-holding Republicans who took climate change seriously did so at their own peril. Florida’s Carlos Curbelo, tapped to chair the bipartisan Congressional Climate Caucus, lost his seat in 2018. Others were “primaried” – beaten by more conservative Republicans in the preliminaries – or retired to avoid a primary loss. Even the GOP’s two conspicuous Trump dissenters, Wyoming’s Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of southern Illinois, serve where Coal is King, and they tend to vote that way. Cheney sports a 2 percent lifetime rating on the League of Conservation scorecard; Kinzinger a whopping 8 percent.
Republican senators from climate-vulnerable states, like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski or John Kennedy of Louisiana, also represent oil-and-gas-dependent states and will reliably vote their carbon consciences.
So throw in coal-state Dem Joe Manchin, and the major clean energy boost in Biden’s platform is toast.
Big Oil is dropping millions on airing its own Big Lie in ads during news and talk shows. The American Petroleum Institute’s breezy spots cast Big Oil as “the leader” in reducing American emissions, even as it lavishes its Congressional apologists with campaign cash.
And while the petrochemical industry still loves cars, trucks, planes and ships, it’s actively dating other polluting suitors. Immense plastics plants are planned for Louisiana, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, negating many of the gains achieved in cutting greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. EHN.org had that story, about the growth of this new market for oil, earlier this week.
Pogo’s famous line
Douglas Fischer / EHS
We go back to Pogo J. Possum’s famous line – “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The McCarthy-era comic strip offered the quip as commentary on Americans’ talent for acting in their own worst interest.
Next week, the world’s nations will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, to weigh the next steps in cutting greenhouse gases and limiting the climate catastrophe awaiting us all.
President Biden’s chief climate emissary, John Kerry, called Glasgow “the last best hope” for climate action. He added that failure by the U.S. Congress to deliver something on climate will send the worst possible signal to the world.
And the world’s other colossal greenhouse emitters, China and India, are talking the talk but showing little actual progress.
Glasgow will open with raised urgency, raised ambitions – and raised doubts.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
The plastics industry in the United States is on track to release more greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) than coal-powered electricity generating plants by the end of the decade, according to a new report released on Thursday.
The report, by Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics project, found that the American plastics industry is releasing at least 232m tons of GHG annually, the equivalent to 116 average-sized coal-fired power plants.
“Plastics is the new coal and it is a major environmental justice concern … The health impacts of the emissions are disproportionately borne by low-income communities and communities of color,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former regional Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator under President Obama.
Ninety per cent of the plastics industry’s reported climate change pollution takes place in just 18 communities, where residents earn 28% less than the average American household and are 67% more likely to be minority communities.
The report identified 10 different stages in which plastics manufacturing emits the most significant GHG.
Hydro-fracking is expected to release 45m tons of methane annually in the US by 2025. Transporting and processing fracked gases emit roughly 4.8m tons of methane a year.
Petrochemical ethane gas cracker facilities release at least 70m tons of GHG annually. Other plastic raw materials manufacturing is responsible for 28m tons of GHG emissions per year.
Exports and imports of plastics raw materials and products emit at least 51m tons of GHG annually, equivalent to more than 25 coal-fired power plants.
In addition, the report found that the petrochemical industry’s plastics infrastructure is expanding rapidly.
Since 2019, at least 42 US plastics facilities have opened, are under construction or are in the permitting process. If the facilities become fully operational, they could release an additional 55m tons of GHG – or the equivalent of another 27 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants – by 2025.
“I want to explain to you ethane crackers. At the hydro-fracking sites, you have ethane released to the atmosphere. The best way to prevent this flaring of ethane into the atmosphere would be to close and properly cap hydro-fracking. Instead, the petrochemical industry has found a way to use the ethane as a building block for plastics,” Enck said at a press conference on Thursday.
“They [companies in the industry] capture the ethane, build new pipelines, send the gas to ethane cracker facilities, which is heated at very high temperatures and cracked, thus the name, and that becomes the major building block for single-use plastic. It uses an enormous amount of energy … all to give us more single-use plastic packaging,” she said.
With the World Economic Forum projecting global plastics production to triple by 2050, Enck said the new focus of the fossil fuel industry is plastics, saying: “Fossil fuel companies are making less money on generating power and less money for transportation … so [they] see plastics as the plan B.
“There’s no plan B for the rest of us. We are in a climate crisis,” she said.
With dozens of new plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities in the works, the U.S. plastics industry will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal-fired power plants by 2030, say the authors of a new report.
Emissions from the plastics sector equaled that of 116 coal-fired power plants last year, according to the report out Thursday from Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics project. Meanwhile, 42 plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities have opened, or are in the process of being built or permitted, since 2019.
“As the world transitions away from fossil fuels for electricity generation and for transportation, the petrochemical industry has found a new market for fossil fuels: plastics,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, told reporters on Thursday.
With the U.S. coal industry in decline, the report authors say policymakers at home and at the upcoming COP26 climate summit, a conference happening at the end of month where world leaders will hash out the details of climate pledges, need to factor the climate toll of plastics into emissions reductions efforts.
“Leaving out plastics is leaving out a giant piece of the problem,” Enck said. “We would like the national leaders that are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, to take the plastics issue just as seriously as they are taking transportation and electricity generation.”
Climate costs of U.S. plastics
The report authors calculated emissions from 10 stages of plastics production, from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the raw material—ethane in natural gas—all the way up to burning waste in incinerators.
Cracker plants, where natural gas is heated at such high temperatures that it fractures into plastic building blocks like ethylene, have the heaviest emissions toll, producing around 70 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants, which is equal to the emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants. Because the report looks at emissions from a range of greenhouse gases, the authors converted the warming potential of all the pollutants into an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
The authors say that emissions reports from the plastics industry are incomplete as they don’t adequately account for leaks of methane—a greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more climate-warming than carbon dioxide in the short-term—and other gases from the transport and production of plastics feedstocks.
They note that while so-called “chemical recycling,” which uses large amounts of energy to melt used plastics into building blocks for fuel and other products, is uncommon now, new plants could add up to 18 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent pollutants by 2025. Enck referred to chemical recycling as plastics’ “new deception” now that Americans are aware that less than 9% of plastics are recycled.
Shipping resins and other plastics building blocks overseas accounts for a significant amount of emissions as well, said Jim Vallette, president of Material Research, the firm that Beyond Plastics hired to do the report analysis. “Plastic is very much like the new coal because the coal industry also is counting on exports to stay alive,” he added.
Harmful plastics pollution
Plastics facilities don’t just create planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. They also release benzene, formaldehyde, and the carcinogen ethylene oxide, among other harmful pollutants. The plastics industry has come under fire in recent years for building its polluting plants in poorer parts of the country: 90% of the climate pollution from U.S. plastics plants occurs in just 18 communities that are mostly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report.
“The health impacts of the emissions are disproportionately borne by low-income communities and communities of color, making this a major environmental justice issue,” Enck said.
Two nonprofits take different approaches to the problem of removing the 24 billion pounds of plastic that flow into the ocean each year—and face different challenges. Will we ever find a solution that works?
On board a ship that just arrived in the British Columbia town of Victoria, northwest of Seattle, instead of a haul of fish, there’s more than 46,000 pounds of plastic trash, following another 17,000 pounds that arrived six weeks ago. It’s an infinitesimally tiny amount compared to the problem—roughly 11 million metric tons (or more than 24 billion pounds) of plastic end up in the ocean every year—but it’s a proof of concept for The Ocean Cleanup, the nonprofit that just finished the latest trial of its technology.
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“We’re attacking the plastic problem on two fronts,” says Henk van Dalen, ocean director at the Netherlands-based organization. “One of them is closing the tap by making sure that plastic doesn’t go into the ocean [from rivers]. The other part of it is cleaning up the legacy of plastic which is already in the ocean.”
[Photo: courtesy The Ocean Cleanup]
The nonprofit has spent years developing ways to fish plastic from the ocean’s surface. Founder Boyan Slat came up with the idea of building a system that could passively collect plastic using ocean currents as a high school student a decade ago—and after an explosively viral TED talk about the concept in 2012, was able to get the funding to begin building the technology. By 2019, after challenges with earlier prototypes, the team finally found a design that worked. But they continued making changes, realizing that the system needed to collect plastic at a larger scale. The latest version, called System 002, uses two ships that slowly pull a net through the water, instead of passively floating with the waves, which is how earlier designs operated.
[Photo: courtesy The Ocean Cleanup]
“That means you then are not solely dependent on all the environmental conditions, but you can actually propel the system forward a slight bit faster, so you can capture plastic more effectively,” van Dalen says. The boats pulling the system can also travel to areas with the highest density of trash, and the design also makes it possible to cover a larger area. In the latest test, the boats were 500 meters apart. The team plans to triple that distance in the next iteration. Otherwise, van Dalen says, it would be necessary to have a very large number of these systems in operation. If the next design works as intended, the engineers believe that 10 of the systems could clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
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[Photo: courtesy The Ocean Cleanup]
It’s a relatively simple design, to the point that one critic argued that the nonprofit has spent millions of dollars to invent trawl fishing. But trawl fishing also poses environmental challenges, since a net that’s being swept through the ocean can catch marine animals along with plastic. The Ocean Cleanup has been studying the impact on marine life, and had third-party biologists and zoologists on hand to assess any marine life that were caught and return any live animals to the water. The organization says that the bycatch—the extra marine life it caught beyond the plastic—was “minimal.”
Still, some critics argue that the approach is too potentially harmful to continue. “I believe there should be an immediate moratorium on surface skimming plastic in the open ocean and other remote areas,” says Rebecca Helm, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, who has written about the risks of ocean cleanup. “We don’t know enough about the ecosystems. We have reason to believe there could be serious ecosystem consequences that merit precaution.” Because the organization is also now using ships running on fossil fuels, instead of the initial passive system, carbon pollution is another problem.
[Photo: courtesy Ocean Voyages Institute]
Another nonprofit, Ocean Voyages Institute, takes a different approach, focusing primarily on pulling up “ghost nets” left behind by the fishing industry. The organization works with volunteer sailors who put GPS trackers on the ghost nets as they encounter them, and then uses sailing cargo vessels—ships that rely mostly on wind power—to travel to those areas, hook the nets, and slowly pull them out of the water. Last year, the organization collected 340,000 pounds of fishing nets and other plastic waste.
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“With all of the nets that we’ve removed, we’ve never found any live creatures,” says Mary Crowley, founder and executive director of Ocean Voyages Institute. “We’ve found skeletons of sea turtles and swordfish.” Removing the old nets is critical, she says, because they can so easily trap animals. The group also sometimes removes consumer plastic trash, like plastic bottles, by hand—something that’s obviously very difficult to scale up. (The nonprofit plans to also begin testing some other tools for collecting smaller plastic trash in some areas.)
Crowley argues that any amount of cleanup is helpful, even if the task seems Sisyphean. “People can feel that that’s insignificant compared to the huge volume of plastic that ends up in the ocean every year,” she says. “But it’s not really insignificant when you think about saving whales and dolphins and turtles.”
[Photo: courtesy The Ocean Cleanup]
Solving the plastic problem will require rethinking how the material is used in the beginning, so it isn’t landing in the ocean in the first place. That means a long list of changes, from consumers and companies moving away from single-use plastic and governments making brands responsible for the trash they create to better recycling infrastructure, especially in the developing world. The fishing industry needs to stop leaving nets behind in the water. And technology can also help collect plastic before it flows from rivers to oceans, as in another project from The Ocean Cleanup. But there’s an enormous amount of plastic already in the ocean, so solutions like these—or others that may later be developed—are also important. Each shipload of plastic trash is also a visceral reminder that the whole system has to change.
Communities throughout St. James, St. John the Baptist, and Louisiana’s other “River Parishes”—those located along the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge—shoulder some of the worst impacts of industry in the U.S.
While most of the nation’s residents live with a cancer risk of around six to 25 in a million, throughout this region, cancer risks run significantly higher, reaching 2,000 in a million in part of St. John the Baptist Parish, where a neoprene factory, Denka Performance Elastomer, emits a constant cocktail of chemicals, including carcinogenic chloroprene gas.
As a result, this region of Louisiana has acquired a grim reputation as Cancer Alley. In total, it is home to approximately 150 industrial plants—many of which produce chemicals used to make plastic—stretching across 85 miles of rural land, along both banks of the Mississippi. From the worst-polluted part of the Pacific Ocean, I had traced the destructive path of plastic back to a major source, in the most notoriously toxic region of America’s petrochemical landscape.
On my way to Welcome from New Orleans, in Norco, St. Charles Parish, I drove around two enormous refineries, one owned by Valero and the other by Royal Dutch Shell, and past two chemical plants, on narrow roads lined with sludgy drainage ditches slick with oil. These complexes surround Norco’s few thousand human inhabitants and their homes, shops, restaurants, post office, and places of worship.
Norco was named by and for New Orleans Refining Company (NORCO), the town’s earliest industrial inhabitant, in 1916, following its purchase of former plantation land. In 1929, Shell acquired NORCO’s refinery, expanding operations significantly to include production of chemicals used to make plastic, on agricultural land I’d later learn had been wrested from the descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans who had established farms in a community called Diamond.
Diamond, which began as a small Black neighborhood, has been wracked by two lethal explosions at the Shell plant, in 1973 and 1988. Its residents have long suspected that their constant exposure to toxics was making them sick, though health officials have suggested the increased incidence of cancers and other diseases their community has seen could also be caused by smoking and other lifestyle choices. Norco’s white neighborhoods, located farther afield from the town’s most dangerous industrial operations, are less exposed.
Citizen air pollution science
Diamond once was a vibrant African American community. Today four mostly empty streets remain, running through tidy plots, many barren, a few with still-occupied homes. Diamond is a modern ghost town born out of necessity, as revealed by investigations and justice-seeking efforts spearheaded by Margie Eugene-Richard, an African American woman who grew up just 25 feet from Shell’s Diamond petrochemical plant.
Having witnessed Shell’s numerous disasters striking in her own backyard, and the company’s pollution sickening close friends and family members, Richard spearheaded efforts to hold the company accountable.With the help of Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the Sierra Club, and other nonprofit allies, Richard formed a community group called the Concerned Citizens of Norco, which called on residents to gather air samples with “buckets”: low-cost, DIY research tools typically constructed from rigid five-gallon plastic containers, tubes, valves, and Tedlar bags (which are designed to hold volatile gases). Once collected, air is sent to laboratories for chemical analyses.
In 1994, personal injury attorney Ed Masry, who worked with Erin Brockovich, equipped residents of Contra Costa County, California, with the earliest iteration of these buckets to collect polluted air in neighborhoods near Unocal Corporation’s Rodeo refinery. This air-sampling effort helped reveal unchecked air pollution that had sickened thousands of people living nearby. Unocal ultimately settled an $80 million lawsuit paid out to some 6,000 residents. Since, air-sampling kits used by so-called bucket brigades have helped many communities across the US keep tabs on their local air pollution levels and hold industries accountable for violating emissions regulations.
Diamond residents used their air pollution data, which revealed concerning levels of toxic chemicals, to take Shell to court, demanding relocation. During many frustrating years of litigation, Shell continued to pollute. Finally, in 2000, after Richard traveled straight to Shell’s top corporate officials working at The Hague, the company made its first buyout offer. But it was offensively low: just $26,000 per property. Richard and her allies kept pushing back to get a fair price for giving up their homes. Finally, in 2002, Shell offered to buy out Diamond’s residents—extending home-improvement loans to the few who chose to stay—and reduce its emissions, formally acknowledging that living in Diamond was too risky. Most people, including Richard, have left Diamond, though Richard would devote her life to advocating for other communities overtaken by industry in the US and abroad.
In LaPlace, St. John the Baptist Parish, a handful of cows languidly roamed a scruffy patch of dead roadside grass at the foot of the steam-ing, gleaming scaffolding of yet another chemical complex. The blue-and-white logo affixed to a large chemical storage tank read “Denka Performance Elastomer.”
When I stepped out my car to get a better look at the animals, the sharp scent of industrial emissions stung my sinuses, and my temples began to throb. Almost immediately, I noticed a pickup truck outfitted with security mirrors and flashing lights rolling toward me. I hurriedly snapped a few photos of the cows—and inevitably, the plant—before returning to my car and driving on.
The expanding industrial complex
Near Garyville, approaching St. James Parish, the landscape and everything that occupied it appeared increasingly sepia toned. The streets, the fences, the houses, the electricity wires, and the grass that miraculously continued to grow—everything was acquiring a rusty tint that intensified in hue when an industrial complex came into view a few miles down the road.
This one was a hodgepodge of round-topped domes, silos and pipes, and smokestacks, all coated with a layer of bauxite ore, a red claylike substance used in aluminum refining, imported from Jamaica. Bauxite dust, which often contains traces of heavy metals, is considered an occupational hazard for people who work with the ore. For miles, the clay clung to everything, even the air, which felt gritty inside my mouth. The wind carried the plant’s toxic emissions, sending mercury invisibly into the air and sweeping it across the orange landscape, where it accumulated in the soil, nearby streams and rivers, and the mighty Mississippi.
I continued driving past more toxic tailings ponds, more chemical plants, more piles of industrial waste, until I reached the Sunshine Bridge. After crossing the cantilever bridge, I followed River Road past the Mosaic company’s fertilizer and ammonia factory and AmSty’s polystyrene plant to finally arrive in Welcome.
When I arrived, I climbed up the grassy levee to take a look at the river. I could see a grain barge loading up against a collection of floating storage containers strapped together like a giant metal raft near the undeveloped bank—just grass and mud and twisting live oaks—most of them dead and crumbling.
Upriver, I could see a tangle of thick pipes reaching across the levee and over the highway, supplying petroleum to yet another chemical plant. The site of the proposed plastic factory, an enormous acreage of over-grown grass, was cordoned off by nothing more than a tall, chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire.
Erica Cirino is a science writer and artist who explores the intersection of the human and nonhuman worlds. Her photographic and written works have appeared in Scientific American, The Guardian, VICE, Hakai Magazine, The Atlantic, and other esteemed publications. She is a recipient of fellowships from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and Safina Center, as well as several awards for visual art.
Banner photo: Oil refineries in Louisiana. (Credit: wisepig/flickr)
Tiny bits of plastic are swirling in the sky, and a new model suggests they could be subtly affecting the climate.
Like the ash spewed from a supervolcano, microplastics have infested the atmosphere and encircled the globe. These are bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters long, and they come in two main varieties. Fragments spawn from disintegrating bags and bottles (babies drink millions of tiny particles a day in their formula), and microfibers tear loose from synthetic clothing in the wash and flush out to sea. Winds then scour land and ocean, carrying microplastics high into the atmosphere. The air is so lousy with the stuff that each year, the equivalent of over 120 million plastic bottles fall on 11 protected areas in the US, which account for just 6 percent of the country’s total area.
In a study published today in the journal Nature, scientists have taken a first swing at modeling how the atmospheric particles could be influencing the climate, and it’s a strange mix of good news and bad. The good news is that microplastics may be reflecting a tiny bit of the sun’s energy back into space, which would actually cool the climate ever so slightly. The bad news is that humanity is loading the environment with so much microplastic (ocean sediment samples show that concentrations have been doubling every 15 years since the 1940s), and the particles themselves are so varied, that it’s hard to know how the pollutant will ultimately influence the climate. At some point they may end up heating the planet.
Earth absorbs some of the sun’s energy while also reflecting some of it, an exchange known as radiative forcing. Like other aerosols in the atmosphere, such as dust and ash, microplastics interact with this energy, the modeling found. “They’re very good at scattering sunlight back to space, so we see that cooling influence coming through,” says atmospheric chemist Laura Revell, lead author of the new paper. “But they are also pretty good at absorbing the radiation emitted by the Earth, which means that they can contribute to the greenhouse effect in a very small way.”
Like snowflakes, no two microplastics are alike—they’re made of many different polymers, and they come in a rainbow of colors. Fragments chip away as they tumble around the environment, while fibers split over and over again. And each particle grows a unique “plastisphere” of bacteria, viruses, and algae.
So when Revell and her colleagues set out to build a model of how they affect the climate, they knew it would be impossible to represent so much diversity. Instead, they determined the general optical properties of fibers and fragments as two main groups—for instance, how well they’d reflect or absorb the sun’s energy. They based their model on pure polymers without pigments, and assumed an atmospheric composition of 100 particles per cubic meter of air. The researchers then plugged all this into an existing climate model, which told them the estimated effect that atmospheric microplastics would have on the climate.
Airborne microplastics samplers in Canterbury, New Zealand
Photograph: Alex Aves
The current net effect is basically a wash, they found. The slight cooling caused by reflection would pretty much cancel out the slight warming caused by absorbing the sun’s radiation. (They didn’t translate this into a potential temperature change for the climate overall.)
The Earth may actually get more cooling from dust in the atmosphere. If you’ve heard of solar geoengineering, it’s the same principle: Planes spray aerosols, which bounce the sun’s energy back into space. Oddly enough, cargo ships do it too, albeit inadvertently: The clouds of pollution they spew both contribute to global warming and act as light-reflecting clouds.
“I want to emphasize that this is not a good thing, though,” says Revell of the slight cooling effect. First of all, microplastic is its own danger to ecosystems—and our own bodies. And second, color is one of the limitations of such an early model. While the researchers based their model on nonpigmented particles, microplastics come in a wide range of hues, clothing microfibers in particular. Color will have a significant influence on potential radiative forcing: Darker hues absorb more energy, while lighter colors reflect more. Once the colors of the particles are factored into future models, scientists may find they are actually likely to lead to warming. At present, there’s just no way of knowing how many particles of what color are swirling in the atmosphere. Plus, the microbes that grow on the particles might change their reflectivity, as well.
This new modeling is the beginning of the marriage of climate science and microplastic science. “This is an interesting first study on the direct radiative forcing of atmospheric microplastics,” says Cornell University atmospheric scientist Natalie Mahowald, who has modeled microplastics in the atmosphere. “The results are likely to be very sensitive to the assumptions about the size, distribution, as well as the color of the microplastics.”
As Mahowold points out, distribution is another complicating factor for this early model. Scientists can take air samples and characterize the microplastics they snag, but those represent just a blip in a massive atmosphere—plus, the population of microplastics at 100 feet off the ground might be way different than at 1,000 feet. Smaller plastics, for instance, might loft higher. Revell and her colleagues also used a set concentration—100 particles per cubic meter of air—whereas scientists are getting wildly different counts as they’re sampling around the world. Over the ocean, plastic concentration might be less than one particle per cubic meter, but above Beijing it’s 5,600, and above London it’s 2,500.
And then there are the nanoplastics, which are smaller than a millionth of a meter, the product of larger bits degrading until they finally reach the nano realm. Very few scientists have the equipment and expertise required to sample for nanoplastics, but one team working in the remote Alps found that a minimum of 200 billion particles fell on a single square meter of a mountain each week. The atmosphere is positively teeming with plastic particles—yet scientists can’t detect them all.
But there’s an indication in the new model that the presence of so many pollutants is doing something to the climate, and one area of speculation is whether they are influencing cloud formation. A cloud forms when water gloms onto particulate matter like dust. What if atmospheric microplastics are actually acting as additional nuclei?
In the lab, at least, scientists have watched the particles gather ice in special chambers that replicate atmospheric conditions. “This would then be a really fascinating pathway, if microplastics were behaving in this manner and contributing to clouds, just because clouds have such huge effects themselves on the energy balance and on the climate system,” says Revell. Bigger, brighter clouds bounce more of the sun’s radiation back into space, so this is one way that the pollutants could deflect energy.
Revell will be doing more sampling of atmospheric microplastics to feed more data into her modeling. And it’s very likely that over time, there will only be more plastic to sample. “Unless we really make some huge changes to how we’re dealing with microplastic pollution, and our rates of plastic production and our waste management practices, then we just expect that plastics are going to continue to fragment out there in the environment,” says Revell. “They’ll be producing more microplastics. And those microplastics will be able to be picked up by winds and carried around and exert a large influence on the climate.”
The Spinelli Complex at Mount Anthony Union High School. Courtesy photo
” data-medium-file=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-300×225.jpeg” data-large-file=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-610×458.jpeg” width=”610″ height=”458″ src=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-610×458.jpeg” alt class=”lazyload wp-image-375687″ data-sizes=”(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px” srcset=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-610×458.jpeg 610w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-300×225.jpeg 300w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-125×94.jpeg 125w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-768×576.jpeg 768w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-1536×1152.jpeg 1536w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-2048×1536.jpeg 2048w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-150×112.jpeg 150w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/image0-370×278.jpeg 370w”>The Spinelli Complex at Mount Anthony Union High School. Courtesy photo
Mount Anthony Union High School’s main athletic field is in rough shape. Conditions at the Bennington school have been so bad that sports teams cannot use it to practice and use it only for games during the fall season.
In recent years, that’s prompted the school’s activities director, Ashley Hoyt, to look into the school’s options. On Nov. 2, residents in the school district will vote on whether to spend $3.5 million to upgrade the Spinelli Complex, which includes an upgraded multiuse building, track and, according to a conceptual plan by the engineers, an 82,500-square-foot synthetic turf field.
While many agree the current field does not work for athletes and coaches, some are raising concerns that synthetic turf could contain the toxic chemical group PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are known to cause an array of harmful health effects, including cancer, when ingested.
Widespread PFAS contamination in Bennington from the former Teflon coating business ChemFab, owned by Saint Gobain, continues to affect residents, including having a major impact on drinking water.
In a report sent to school administrators, the manufacturers of the synthetic turf field and track assured MSK Engineering and Goldstone Architecture, who are working on the project, that the materials do not contain the emerging class of toxic “forever chemicals,” and advocates for the field point to existing turf fields elsewhere in Vermont.
But those who oppose the artificial turf project — including state legislators, a former official with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Vermont Natural Resources Council and Vermont Conservation Voters — say the risks outweigh the benefits.
They’ve expressed concerns about the most common tests for PFAS in turf, which may not identify the full scope of the chemical class. Jon Groveman, policy and water program director at the Vermont Natural Resources Council, has reviewed the manufacturer’s tests and does not think they’re conclusive.
The report includes only several dozen chemicals within the PFAS class, but Groveman said there are thousands of others that are not yet regulated.
“There is, to our understanding, a way to actually do further analysis and certify that there really isn’t any of the thousands of PFAS in the product,” he said. “But that hasn’t been done.”
Earlier this year, Gov. Phil Scott signed Act 36, which bans certain products containing PFAS — such as firefighting foam, food packaging, carpets and ski wax — from being sold in the state. On Monday, federal officials with the Environmental Protection Agency made forward movement on efforts to limit the chemical class in consumer products, The New York Times reported.
“If it’s present, then Bennington is going to have issues,” said Lauren Hierl, executive director of Vermont Conservation Voters. “Any community choosing to look at this could end up inadvertently bringing PFAS into their community and then having to deal with the potential health and environmental risks that come along with that.”
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, who sponsored Act 36, said legislators need to continue to probe the issue.
“If you look at what the state has done already, we are moving in the direction, more and more and more, of working to keep PFASes out of our environment,” he said. “So as much as we can do, I think we’ll continue to do that.”
Tim Holbrook, chair of the Mount Anthony Union School District, said synthetic turf has become a popular choice for schools in recent years.
“It isn’t something that we’re inventing,” he said. “There are four or five different high schools in Vermont that have them, and as far as we know, no one’s ever had a problem with them at all.”
The Mount Anthony Union School District Board is scheduled to hear a range of opinions on the matter Wednesday night at its regularly scheduled meeting and plans to hold an additional informational meeting later this month for members of the public.
Big dirt patch
Andrew Gilbert, a senior at Mount Anthony who plays football and lacrosse, hopes to see a new Spinelli Complex where more teams can play and practice.
“When you’re in middle school and coming up through elementary school playing sports, especially football, Friday nights on Spinelli — you don’t beat that atmosphere,” he said.
The soccer and football teams play games on the field, but all practices and all other sports are relegated to other fields to avoid wear and tear that is already causing uneven terrain. Hoyt, the athletic director, said she’s seen that terrain cause injuries.
“After football and soccer season, the field is totally chewed up,” Hoyt said. “If you were to walk our field, right now, the whole center is just a big dirt patch. There’s uneven surfaces. We don’t even honestly have grass on it at this point.”
Other fields — where practices take place and other sports play — don’t have abundant spectator seating, are not wheelchair-accessible and often flood, she said.
A fact sheet, published alongside a number of other documents related to the project on the board’s website, said artificial turf has become more popular because it’s free of fertilizer and pesticides, it reduces water and maintenance costs, and it increases the amount of possible playing time on the field. It also says that the fields “result in fewer injuries because of the improved and level playing surface,” but studies have shown that synthetic turf can cause higher rates of lower-extremity injuries.
In February 2020, the school board convened an ad hoc committee, which included coaches, administrators, board members and community members, to review the options for upgrading the turf field. Hoyt said they looked at natural turf, but even what she calls the “Cadillac” of grass fields wouldn’t have enough playability and durability.
“The field would still need tons of upkeep and maintenance,” she said. “We’d still be painting the field multiple times a week. That just wasn’t something that we wanted.”
The committee voted unanimously to recommend an artificial turf in March 2021. In September, MSK Architects and Goldstone Architecture presented a feasibility study to the board. The vote is scheduled for Nov. 2.
“The board has been very, very clear that they do not want to have a field that has the potential to harm anybody,” Holbrook said. “That certainly is paramount.”
Environmental concerns
Environmentalists have raised a list of concerns about the proposed field that range from microplastics pollution to the temperature of turf fields and the risk of PFAS contamination. PFAS has been identified in various types of turf across the country.
Scientists with the Children’s Environmental Health Center of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have raised concerns about children’s exposure to recycled rubber, which is often included in turf.
“Everything that we’ve learned from working on these issues with a coalition of people throughout the country is that these risks are not worth taking,” Groveman said. “The more we learn about these chemicals, the more dangerous we find out they are.”
Hierl, with Vermont Conservation Voters, said she’s concerned about disposing of the synthetic material when the turf’s lifespan is over — school board documents say the turf would likely last around 15 years with proper maintenance.
Hierl serves on the Montpelier City Council, where the wastewater treatment facility is accepting landfill leachate from Coventry. Discharge from Montpelier’s facility already has high readings of PFAS.
“It creates these ripple effect problems downstream,” she said. “For us, it’s trying to assess, what are the costs and benefits and the risks that you’re taking on and would want any community to have their eyes wide open.”
Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison, said both the Legislature’s Health and Welfare Committee and the Natural Resources Committee and Energy Committee, which he chairs, have been working to reduce the presence of toxic chemicals in the state — and particularly at schools. Burlington High School had to relocate after PCBs were found at the campus, he said.
“I’m thinking about prudence and liability,” Bray said. “I just would want to be very careful about bringing anything potentially toxic into the state, period, and most specifically to a school. And then Bennington itself has a very sensitive history on PFAS.”
‘It’s just ironic’
Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration and is now a senior fellow at Bennington College, said she recommends against synthetic turf, which she described as a “plastic shag carpet.”
She’s concerned about PFAS, she said, but she also has other concerns. Synthetic turf also creates hotter surfaces and contributes to microplastic pollution. She believes plastic turf fields should be banned in the state.
“It’s just ironic that a community that’s been so negatively impacted by toxic chemicals in drinking water would even consider putting this type of material on playing fields for children,” she said.
Town officials have asked whether PFAS entering the environment could impact Saint Gobain’s responsibility to clean up existing pollution in Bennington. Peter Walke, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, said the situation likely wouldn’t affect an existing settlement between the company and the state.
If there were a PFAS release from the school, Walke said, and it affected wells included in the settlement, Saint Gobain could request that the school help pay for the cleanup.
“We don’t see that as likely,” he said. “The school is in an area where water lines either already existed or will be extended to cover the impacted wells from the PFAS contamination, so we don’t anticipate that being a significant issue.”
Campion wonders who would hold responsibility for cleaning up potential pollution — a cost he said should not fall to taxpayers.
“I think we all really believe kids deserve a great space to play on and to explore athletics,” Campion said. “But it has to be safe. It absolutely has to be safe for kids, and it absolutely has to be safe for the environment today and going forward.”
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Almost 80 per cent of the particles found in the stomachs of fish studied come from textiles and clothing that are washed into waterways in the laundry process, the report said.
Author of the article:
The Canadian Press
Hina Alam
An inquisitive beluga whale takes a pause from feeding on capelin to view its surroundings in the St. Lawrence-Saguenay Marine Park, near Tadoussac, 450 kilometers northeast of Montreal, in this 2007 file photo.Photo by Robert J. Galbraith /Montreal Gazette
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VANCOUVER — Hundreds of thousands of tiny bits of plastic waste have been found in the prey of belugas, proving that the pollution in the whales is making its way even to the most remote Arctic waters, a new study says.
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In the study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, researchers looked at five species of Arctic fish that are regular prey of belugas and found 21 per cent of them had microplastic particles in their gastrointestinal tracts.
The lead author of the study, Rhiannon Moore, said this finding confirmed that microplastics are moving up the food chain.
“It’s a worry because plastic, as we know, is everywhere, and we don’t really know the long-term effect of all the different types of plastic that are ending up in these species,” she said in an interview.
Moore, who recently completed a master of science degree at Simon Fraser University and is a zero-waste outreach co-ordinator with the City of Victoria, said many northern animals are encountering environmental change.
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“So, we have species that are experiencing the effects of climate change, increased marine traffic, migration patterns — all sorts of changes. And so this is just another … human-made impact that that’s occurring.”
Microplastics are contaminants that are less than five millimetres in size.
Almost 80 per cent of the particles found in the stomachs of fish studied come from textiles and clothing that are washed into waterways in the laundry process, the report said.
There is evidence that tiny bacteria make these fibres their home, increasing their palatability for fish, it added.
The study documents microplastics in the stomachs of fish from the Eastern Beaufort Sea, north of Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Alaska.
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The latest study builds on the team’s previous work where researchers looked at the bodies of seven belugas from an Indigenous hunt by members of the Inuvialuit community of Tuktoyaktuk in the western Canadian Arctic. That study estimated the whales ingest upwards of 145,000 particles of microplastics a year.
Moore said it confirms belugas are likely ingesting the plastics through their prey.
“So, before … we were making assumptions and estimations, and now we really know that plastic is in the food that whales eat, and likely other other species.”
The latest study said the Arctic deep sea has been identified as a potential source of plastic accumulation.
Belugas are known to dive to depths greater than 1,000 metres and spend “significant” time at the sea floor bottom, it said.
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“How climate change will influence beluga foraging behaviour and activity in the deep sea, and the associated exposure to plastic debris remains unclear,” the report said.
Peter Ross, a senior scientist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and a co-author of the report, said evidence suggests that microplastics in the Arctic are largely making their way on currents from the Atlantic Ocean.
“The Arctic communities are not really big players in contaminating their backyard,” he said.
“So, we have yet again another example of a pollutant from the more urbanized and industrialized south moving quickly and readily into the Arctic.”
There is “near universal contamination” of the water in the Arctic, he said.
Moore said she was “not necessarily surprised” by the findings because of the large quantities of plastic that enter the oceans every year.
But she said she is hoping that the discovery spurs people into taking action.
“Everyone loves whales, and nobody really wants whales to be threatened in any way,” Moore said.
“Whenever you talk about whales and pollution, it tugs on their heartstrings and so you would hope that this would cause people to act and look at daily life choices.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 20, 2021.
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