In a recent study, Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Sea Search-Namibian Dolphin Project and Ocean Conservation Namibia (OCN) found that hundreds of Cape Fur seals are entangled each year, mainly in fishing lines and nets, causing horrific injuries and can result in a slow, painful death.
The study was part of an ongoing project to investigate the impact of pollution on fur seals in Namibia, and demonstrated that a high number of affected animals were pups and juveniles, which were mainly entangled around the neck by fishing line.
“Plastic pollution and particularly lost and discarded fishing nets are having a big impact to marine life. Once entangled, these seals face a very painful and uncertain future: finding food becomes harder and wounds can become deep and debilitating, and likely cause death in many cases,” co-director of the Namibian Dolphin Project and an Hon Senior Lecturer in the Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University, Dr Tess Gridley said:
“Changes to policy could help, such as financial incentives to recover lines, safe disposal of nets and sustainable alternatives to plastics,” Dr Gridley adds.
Have a look at this short video, detailing Sea Search’s work on Cape fur seals together with Ocean Conservation Namibia. This is the devastating reality of the damage caused by plastics in the marine environment.
Sea Search is currently fundraising so they can continue their research into South Africa and continue conservation work. Make a difference today by pledging your support and donating to help undo some of the harm caused by humans at https://gofund.me/8cc1f09f.
This video contains graphic details that may upset sensitive viewers:
Single-use plastic plates and cutlery, and polystyrene cups will be banned in England under government plans, as it seeks to reduce the plastic polluting the environment.
A public consultation will launch in the autumn and the ban could be in place in a couple of years. The move was welcomed by campaigners, but they said overall progress on cutting plastic waste was “snail-paced”, with the EU having banned these items and others in July.
The average person uses 18 throwaway plastic plates and 37 single-use knives, forks and spoons each year, according to ministers, while the durability of plastic litter means it kills more than a million birds and 100,000 sea mammals and turtles every year around the world.
The government will also impose a plastic packaging tax from April 2022. This will charge £200 per tonne for plastic that has less than 30% recycled content, to encourage greater use of recycled material.
“We’ve all seen the damage that plastic does to our environment,” said the environment secretary, George Eustice. “It is right that we put in place measures that will tackle the plastic carelessly strewn across our parks and green spaces and washed up on beaches. We have made progress to turn the tide on plastic, now we are looking to go a step further.”
Plastic items from takeaway food and drink dominate the litter in the world’s oceans, according to research published in June, with single-use bags, plastic bottles, food containers and food wrappers the four most widespread.
Will McCallum, at Greenpeace UK, said: “Banning throwaway plastic items like plates and cutlery is a welcome move, but the UK government is simply playing catch up with the EU. After years of talking about being a global leader in this field, the UK government has managed to crack down on a grand total of four single-use plastic items and microplastics. This snail-paced, piecemeal approach isn’t leadership.”
McCallum said ministers should bring in legally binding targets to halve single-use plastic by 2025 and ban exports of scrap plastic. “The UK public has long been willing and ready to move on from polluting throwaway plastic,” he said. “Is the government listening?”
Hugo Tagholm, at Surfers Against Sewage, said the government’s new proposals were welcome, but long overdue: “This alone will not turn back the plastic tide.” He said the deposit return scheme for plastic bottles must include all bottles.
There should also be a focus on reducing waste at source, said Libby Peake from the Green Alliance thinktank: “Alternatives [to single-use plastic plates and cutlery] made from other materials also aren’t necessary and will store up environmental problems for the future. We need to address the root of the problem, redesigning the system and tackling the throwaway society once and for all.”
The government intends to make companies pay the full cost of recycling and disposing of their packaging and has consulted on introducing the scheme, called “extended producer responsibility” on a phased basis from 2023. It has also consulted on plans to ensure recycling schemes are consistent across the country, with people often confused by different rules in different places.
As the United States comes to grips with the climate crisis, fossil fuels will slowly recede from being primary sources of energy. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that the petrochemical industry is counting on greatly increasing the production of plastics and toxic chemicals made from fossil fuels to profit from its reserves of oil and gas.
That transition is why the challenges of climate, plastic pollution and chemical toxicity — which at first might each seem like distinct problems — are actually interrelated and require a systems approach to resolve. The danger is that if we focus on only a single metric, like greenhouse gas emissions, we may unintentionally encourage the shift from fuel to plastics and chemicals that are also unsafe and unsustainable.
Already, according to a 2018 report from the International Energy Agency, petrochemicals, which are made from petroleum and natural gas, “are rapidly becoming the largest driver of global oil demand.”
Petrochemicals are ubiquitous in everyday products, and many of them are poisoning us and our children. Stain repellents, flame retardants, phthalates and other toxics are contributing to cancer, falling sperm counts, obesity and a host of neurological, reproductive and immune problems, research has shown.
Epidemiological studies over the past decade have found, moreover, that exposure in utero and in childhood to chemicals used as flame retardants, called polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, has been linked to significant declines in IQ. These chemicals, widely used since the 1970s in the United States, were largely phased out in recent years. But they have persisted in the environment. And the push to phase out PBDEs led to “regrettable substitutions,” as the authors of one study put it, replacing one type of phased-out toxic flame retardant with another one that is also harmful.
And plastics, of course, are inundating the planet.
Global chemical production is predicted to double by 2030, according to the United Nations. Plastic production could jump three- to fourfold by 2050, according to a World Economic Forum report in 2016. By that year, the ocean is expected to contain, by weight, more plastic than fish.
Garbage, including plastic waste, at a beach in Panama City in April.Uis Acosta/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Plastic waste at Zikim Beach, near Ashkelon, Israel, in 2019.Amir Cohen/Reuters
A recent study by the Minderoo Foundation, which is working to end plastic waste, found that single-use plastics account for over a third of plastics produced every year. Ninety-eight percent are made from fossil fuels, according to the study.
Fracking and cheap natural gas have made the United States one of the most profitable places in the world to make polyethylene — a common plastic used primarily for packaging. New ethane cracker plants are planned for Pennsylvania and Ohio. These plants turn ethane, a cheap byproduct of natural gas, or naphtha, a crude oil product, into ethylene to make single-use and other plastics.
These facilities will depend on fossil fuels as their feedstock, and the resulting production of plastics will generate more greenhouse gases. More than nine million tons of additional annual ethylene capacity is coming online globally in 2021, according to the consulting firm McKinsey.
If we think we have too much plastic now, we may well be drowning in it in a few decades. The petrochemical industry’s misleading messaging is that plastic waste gets recycled; if not, it’s the consumer’s fault; and the chemicals used in plastics are harmless.
The reality is that plastic waste is often exported to places in Africa and Asia and elsewhere lacking the capacity to recycle or manage the waste. In the United States, this waste often ends up as garbage in landfills and as trash in rivers, along the sides of roads and in oceans. It also accumulates in the bodies of marine mammals, sea birds and humans.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The federal government and industry have made large investments to create low-carbon fuels in recent decades. Similarly large investments are needed to develop safer chemicals and alternatives to plastics.
With the Biden administration, which is committed to combating climate change, we have an opportunity to turn the ship around. An initial step should be to end subsidies to the oil and gas industry. This would raise the price of fossil fuels and the cost of producing petrochemicals, making renewable energy sources more competitive and potentially apply a brake to the growth of the petrochemical industry.
President Biden should push for legislation in Congress that would pause the issuance of permits by the federal government for new or expanded plastic production facilities, refineries, incinerators, waste-to-energy plants and other petrochemical facilities. A pause of up to three years, as called for in the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, would allow the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Academies of Sciences to study the cumulative impact of these facilities and to propose guidelines and standards aimed at protecting human health and the environment.
We can draw on lessons from the European Union. The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, recently proposed an aggressive plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050. It also has developed a plan to build a circular economy based on the reuse and recycling of products and to address the presence of hazardous chemicals in those products. Instead of building more plastic and chemical production facilities, companies should invest in innovative technologies to achieve circular production and reuse.
We now have the leadership to combat the three-headed hydra of climate change, plastic pollution and toxic chemicals threatening us and our ecosystems. Now we need strong legislation and continued investment in research and technology to achieve a healthier planet for our children.
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Marty Mulvihill is a co-founder of the venture capital fund Safer Made and helped create the Center for Green Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Gretta Goldenman is an environmental consultant and the board chair of the Green Science Policy Institute, where Arlene Blum is the executive director.
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Lawyers at the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre are calling for an independent assessment of three proposed petrochemical and plastics facilities in Prince George, B.C., that they say pose “profound risks to the global environment.”
The request filed with Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Strategy George Heyman asks him to refer West Coast Olefins’ proposals for Prince George to an independent panel of experts that can assess the project in its entirety.
UVic Environmental Law Centre legal director Calvin Sandborn said he’s optimistic Heyman will agree with the filing “because it would be irrational to proceed with the largest project in Prince George history without an independent panel conducting public hearings.”
Calgary-based West Coast Olefins Ltd. has been quietly forging ahead with their plans for the $5.6 billion complex, putting together proposals for review by the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission and the Environmental Assessment process.
The company’s website says an investment decision on the project will be made in 2022 and that the Environmental Assessment is in the early stages of determining the scope of information the company will be required to provide.
A diagram of West Coast Olefins’s interconnected plants proposed for Prince George. The first would recover propane, butane and natural gas condensate (known as natural gas liquids or NGLs) from an existing gas pipeline then process NGLs into separate feed stocks. The second ethylene plant would process recovered ethane for use in a third plant to manufacture polyethylene, or plastic, products. (West Coast Olefins Ltd. )
The project is proposed for a site within city limits. The complex would include natural gas liquids extraction and separation plants, an ethylene plant, and a third-party-owned polyethylene plant which would make plastics for primarily Asian markets. As outlined by the company, the three plants feed into each other.
Annie Booth is a University of Northern B.C. professor and organizer with a citizen’s group opposed to the project, Too Close 2 Home. She says the assessments currently underway will not account for the cumulative or long-term impacts of all three facilities. Too Close 2 Home reached out to the Environmental Law Centre in March 2021 after years of raising the alarm over these proposals.
The filing, submitted Aug. 25, states the proposed complex, when considered together and in context, would entrench demand for products made from petrochemicals, making it impossible to address the current climate change emergency. Other points of concern are its impact on Prince George’s already polluted airshed, water and fish, and the social impact of work camps during construction.
West Coast Olefins declined to comment. In the past, CEO Ken James (pictured here) has promised that the facility could create 1,000 permanent jobs at a time when lumber mills are shutting down or curtailing operations. (Nicole Oud/CBC)
West Coast Olefins declined to comment. In the past, CEO Ken James has promised that the facility could create 1,000 permanent jobs at a time when lumbers mills are shutting down or curtailing operations.
Booth is concerned that short-term gains in the job market may be offset by subsequent recruitment challenges. She fears students and workers might not want to move to Prince George, or stay, if they must contend with heavy industry on their doorsteps and increasingly polluted air and water.
The project is also facing opposition from the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation, whose unceded territory includes the proposed construction site.
In a press release earlier this month, Lheidli T’enneh Chief Dolleen Logan said, “I want the federal government, the B.C. government, and our local government partners to be clear in our position… [West Coast Olefins] is not welcome in our territory and on our unceded ancestral lands.”
A spokesperson for the City of Prince George said they aim to “facilitate a welcoming business climate” but their involvement at this time is limited. Council will review the proposals if they are successful in gaining approval from B.C. Oil and Gas, the Environmental Assessment Office and the Agricultural Land Commission. The Regional District of Fraser-Fort George also declined to comment.
A new campaign draws attention to the fact that Starbucks cups are not truly recyclable due to a coating of polyethylene plastic on the inside of the cup.
Starbucks has made several pledges to produce recyclable cups dating back to 2008 — but its cups are still unable to be recycled economically.
Solutions already exist for fully recyclable cups, including a coating for paperboard barrier packaging that uses 40-51% less plastic.
When you order your Venti-sized espresso macchiato at Starbucks, it will arrive in what looks and feels like a cardboard cup topped with a plastic lid. After you finish your drink, you might think about dumping your cup into a paper recycling bin. But you shouldn’t. Starbucks cups are actually lined with polyethylene plastic coating that makes it nearly impossible to recycle, experts say.
“Paper recycling is designed for recycling paper — not plastic,” Will Lorenzi, president of packaging engineering company Smart Planet Technologies, told Mongabay in an interview. “There’s a whole variety of products that have plastic coatings on it … and when those products hit the pulper [in a recycling plant] they block it up. It’s almost like a storm drain. If there’s a few leaves, a branch maybe, the storm drain is going to be fine. But if you get too many leaves and too many branches, all of a sudden the whole drain clogs up.”
It’s estimated that 1.6 million trees are logged each year to produce Starbucks cups, and that 4 million of these cups end up in landfills, according to Stand.Earth, a group that started
in 2016. Starbucks itself actually pledged to create a fully recyclable paper cup back in 2008, but nothing resulted from this commitment.
“So many people have confessed to us that they feel at least a little bit guilty about ordering a single-use coffee in a paper cup that came from critical forests,” Jim Ace, a senior campaigner and actions manager at Stand.Earth, told Mongabay in an email. “Many feel even worse when they learn it’s lined with polyethylene plastic, whether they are concerned for their own health or the health of the planet. Most consumers don’t realize Starbucks cups have been uneconomical to recycle, in part because they are lined with plastic, so they’ve ended up in landfills.”
Activists campaigning for Starbucks to produce a fully recyclable cup. Image by Stand.Earth.
According to a recent survey conducted in the U.S. by the SEAL Awards, which recognizes companies for their sustainability and environmental leadership, 83% of Starbucks customers actually believe that Starbucks cups can be recycled.
“At heart, the cup problem is a moral and leadership issue,” Matt Harney, founder of SEAL, said in a statement. “Like the 83% of consumers we surveyed, I recently thought that paper cups were, in fact, recyclable.”
Stand.Earth ended its campaign in 2019 when Starbucks partnered with other industry giants to support the NextGen Cup Challenge, which called on innovators to create a recyclable and compostable cup. Twelve winners were chosen, but two years later, the problem has still not been solved.
“Starbucks committed itself to solving its cup problem and have taken steps to develop solutions, but the majority of its customers still leave the store with single-use, disposable paper cups that are lined with plastic, which end up in the landfill,” Ace said. “Until that is solved, Starbucks still has a responsibility to address the problem.”
A commercially viable solution is already here, Lorenzi said. In 2016, his company, Smart Planet Technologies, developed EarthCoating, a film for paperboard barrier packaging that uses 40-51% less plastic than conventional plastic coating barriers.
“We came up with something that would basically be recyclable, and at the same time, work just as well as the current packaging we have,” Lorenzi said. The coating uses a special mix of minerals and resin so that the coating can easily be separated from the cardboard during the recycling process, and sink to the bottom of the pulper along with dirt and other residue, he added.
Several big companies, including United Airlines and Taco Bell in Australia, already use recyclable products with EarthCoating, Lorenzi said. Yet Starbucks has not adopted this technology, despite Smart Planet Technologies reaching out to Starbucks on several occasions.
Coffe cups lined with EarthCoding. Image courtesy of Smart Planet Technologies.
“They pretend we don’t exist,” Lorenzi said. “They pretend it’s not happening. They continue to do their own thing.”
On Starbucks’ website, the company pledges to “double the recycled content, recyclability and compostability, and reusability” of its cups and packaging by 2022.
Yet Lorenzi said he is not convinced this is a definitive goal. “It’s about the fifth date they set,” he said. “They started in 2008 — they were going to do it by 2012. And in 2010, they said they’d do it by 2015. In 2015, they said they’d do it by 2020. They’re now with the next one, which is 2022.”
Starbucks did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.
This month, the SEAL Awards Impact Team launched a campaign called #UpTheCup to call on Starbucks to truly adopt a recyclable cup. An accompanying petition has already garnered more than 60,000 signatures.
“In reality, as a society, we entrust leaders to make decisions — like the type of cup used — in a truly responsible way, even if that issue has gone undetected by the general public,” Harney said. “To quote C.S. Lewis, ‘Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.’”
Huge amounts of plastic ends up rivers and oceans every year, harming the environment and potentially also human health. But what if we could pull it out of water with the power of magnets?
As a child, Fionn Ferreira spent hours exploring the coastline near his hometown of Ballydehob in south-west Ireland. But the more time he spent on the sheltered, shingle-strewn coves nearby, he grew increasingly shocked by the large amounts of plastic litter he found strewn across the beach and in the sea.
“It didn’t look nice to me – the coloured bits of plastic all along the shore,” he says.
But it was the plastic that Ferreira couldn’t see which really concerned him. Microplastics are fragments smaller than five millimetres and either come directly from the products we use or are created as larger plastic objects break down in the environment. They are ubiquitous – they have been found at the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench and lodged in Arctic sea ice.
“I got really anxious when I found out about microplastics,” says Ferreira, who is now aged 20 and a chemistry student at Groningen University in the Netherlands. “These plastics are going to be in our environment for thousands of years. We are going to be dealing with them long after we stop using plastic.”
As he learned more about the environmental impact of microplastics in the environment, Ferreira began to look for ways to combat them. And it was a serendipitous discovery on his local beach that gave him the idea for a new way to remove these tiny, omnipresent plastics from the oceans.
Some shower products contain tiny plastic beads that when washed down the drain can escape into the environment where they are difficult to get rid of (Credit: Alamy)
Microplastics are found in our clothes, cosmetics and cleaning products. One load of laundry can release an average of 700,000 microplastic fibres. Less than a millimetre in length, these fibres make their way into rivers and oceans, where they are eaten by fish and even corals. Because of their tiny size, microplastics are able to pass through filtration systems, making it very difficult to avoid them.
One 2018 study, plastic contamination can also be found in bottled water, with 93% of 259 bottled water samples the scientists examined containing microplastics.
“The urgency of the plastic problem has not yet hit people,” says Ferreira. “Plastic pollution is a public health issue. You are not just drinking the plastic, but also the chemicals that are added to it. Plastic attracts heavy metals and brings these into our system.”
Another concern is that plastics could help transport pathogens which bind themselves to the material. A 2016 study found the pathogen Vibrio cholerae, which causes cholera in humans, attached to microplastics sampled from the North and Baltic Seas.
“It is not just a problem of the health of our environment, but really a problem that concerns all of us and our health,” says Ferreira.
And the amount of plastic in the environment is projected to get much worse. Plastic production is expected to increase by 60% by 2030 and triple by 2050. By then, there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK non-profit that promotes the circular economy where materials are reused rather than thrown away.
At the age of 12 years old, Ferreira became determined to find a solution to remove microplastics from water. He started by designing his own spectrometer, a scientific instrument that uses ultraviolet light to measure the density of microplastics in solutions.
“I could see there were a lot of microplastics in the water and they weren’t just coming from big plastic breaking down in the sea,” he says. “There needed to be a way to combat this.”
It was on his local beach that Ferreira came up with a solution that could extract microplastics from water. “I found some oil spill residue with loads of plastic attached to it,” he says. “I realised that oil could be used to attract plastic.”
Ferreira mixed vegetable oil with iron oxide powder to create a magnetic liquid, also known as ferrofluid. He then blended in microplastics from a wide range of everyday items, including plastic bottles, paint and car tyres, and water from the washing machine.
After the microplastics attached themselves to the ferrofluid, Ferreira used a magnet to remove the solution and leave behind only water.
Following 5,000 tests, Ferreira’s method was 87% effective at extracting microplastics from water.
Ferreira is currently in the process of designing a device which uses the magnetic extraction method to capture microplastics as water flows past it. The device will be small enough to fit inside waterpipes to continuously extract plastic fragments as water flows through them. He has also been working on a system that could be fitted to ships so they can extract plastics on the oceans.
Microplastics are found in a wide range of cosmetics and toiletries, but can also come from synthetic clothing and larger plastic items as they break down (Credit: HP)
“There is no current effective solution to remove microplastics in natural waterways,” says Anne-Marieke Eveleens, who created another device known as the Bubble Barrier, a tube device that can be installed on canals and rivers to trap larger plastic waste with a stream of bubbles that guides it to a catchment area, preventing it from entering the ocean. “Our Bubble Barrier is very effective at catching macroplastics and can catch microparticles of plastic as small as 1 mm. Fionn’s innovation has the capacity to remove all types of microplastics.”
In 2019, Ferreira presented his invention to a panel of expert judges at the Google Science Fair, which led to him winning the competition and receiving an educational scholarship of $50,000 (£36,400).
“He observed and tackled a problem he saw locally which has vast global significance,” says Larissa Kelly, Ferreira’s former science teacher at Schull Community College and his mentor for the Google Science Fair entry. “His invention, based on very simple components, is groundbreaking. It has powerful potential to provide solutions that will contribute to the worldwide effort to remove microplastics from the environment.”
“I started out as a lonely inventor,” says Ferreira. “After the Google Science Fair, I could all of a sudden speak to scientists – they gave me credit for what I had done. My idea was no longer a toy invented by a child.”
After receiving funding from the Footprint Coalition, which was founded by actor Robert Downey Jr, Ferreira started scaling up the technology so it could be used at wastewater treatment facilities and prevent microplastics from escaping into the ocean.
He is currently working with US company Stress Engineering to fine-tune his invention and design a device out of stainless steel, glass or recycled plastic. “We’re trying to make something where we are not creating more plastic pollution,” he says.
Humanity produces millions of tonnes of plastic waste every year and a large amount of it escapes to pollute natural habitats (Credit: Andrey Nekrasov/Getty Images)
The technology is “very quick, cheap and low energy,” he says, adding that it can easily be integrated into existing facilities and is able to handle normal flow rates of water.
Ferreira is also developing a consumer-focused device which can be installed inside pipes in homes, cleaning the water as it enters and leaves the house. The aim is to provide people with water that is both safe to drink and sustainable.
“I don’t want to be drinking plastic every day,” he says. “By building this device in our homes, we are not only protecting our health, but also raising awareness.”
He is testing the devices in different water bodies around the world and hopes to commercialise both within the next two years.
But Ferreira says he has encountered scepticism throughout his journey as a young inventor and hopes that inventions such as his will help change that attitude. And as his generation inherits problems created by those that came before them, the world is likely to need more imaginative solutions.
“A lot of people don’t trust young inventors,” he says. “That needs to change. Youth have the power to come up with new creative ideas, they aren’t trained to look down just one tunnel.”
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Bright Sparks Sustainability
This article is part of BBC Future’s Bright Sparks: Sustainability series, which sets out to find the young minds who are finding new and innovative ways of tackling environmental problems. They are the next generation of engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs who are taking control of their own future by seeking solutions to climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and over-consumption.
The U.S. Department of Energy held an online public meeting on Tuesday to find out how frontline communities in Appalachia are impacted by the growing ethane and petrochemical industries. Ethane is a byproduct of natural gas development and can be used to make plastics.
Sean O’Leary, senior researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute, told the DOE that on balance, natural gas development, including pipelines and the ethane cracker being built by Shell in Beaver County to make plastic, are doing more harm than good.
“The environmental burdens currently being placed on the region, by the natural gas industry, and…by expansion of the petrochemical industry, are not only damaging to the well being of residents but have also failed to produce growth in jobs and prosperity,” O’Leary said in a presentation during the DOE meeting.
At the request of Congress, the Energy Department is producing a study on the environmental, health, and local impacts of ethane processing and distribution. It will also look at the potential economic benefits of increasing production, including more exports.
Amanda Woodrum, a researcher at Policy Matters Ohio, spoke on behalf of the coalition called ReImagine Appalachia. She told the DOE that Appalachia is rich in coal and natural gas, and has benefitted from union coal jobs. Still, she said it has been a resource curse. “Where Appalachia has essentially been providing the raw materials for the rest of the country, while itself has been left in poverty,” Woodrum said.
Woodrum pushed DOE for new infrastructure investments in the region.
Biden’s Effort Toward Environmental Justice and Climate Action
“We are determined to tackle these inequities,” said Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, DOE Acting Assistant Secretary of the newly renamedOffice of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which is leading the ethane report for Congress.
“For too long, frontline communities have suffered the negative health and social impacts associated with fossil energy infrastructure built through and around their neighborhoods,” she said. “And at the same time, they’ve been denied the energy access and economic benefits enjoyed in wealthier areas.”
The administration’s goal is to invest in communities impacted by fossil fuels, create good-paying jobs, and tackle climate change, according to Wilcox.
Climate and environmental groups are concerned about carbon emissions from this production.
“Deep decarbonization is the cornerstone of the president’s strategy,” Wilcox said during her opening comments at the ethane meeting. Biden has the goal of cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 and creating a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. “And it means that we have to look at every sector across our economy: energy, transportation, and manufacturing,” she said.
The DOE ethane report, which will include comments from this meeting, is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
A group which is installing a boom made of marine litter at a harbour in Devon hopes the structure will make people more aware of the impact they are having on the environment.
It is hoped the boom in Brixham Harbour will stop floating plastic from reaching the inner seawall and getting trapped in the rocks.
It will be made out of previously recovered waste such as buoys and containers and will be anchored by specially made reef cubes, which will provide a new habitat for marine creatures.
Gary Joliffe, the director of Till the Coast is Clear, which is leading on the project, said: “It’s about working with the community and … getting everyone to work together to get to a point where litter is a rarity in the oceans, the seas and in our harbours, which we are a long way from at the moment.”
The project will also involve a whale sculpture being installed on a pontoon in the harbour, which will double as a receptacle for the rubbish collected from the litter boom, to illustrate the scale of the problem and also the origin of some of the items.
“We are hoping people will say ‘we need to tidy up our act’,” said Mr Joliffe.
The project is funded by restaurant chain Rockfish.
Till the Coast is Clear is a community interest company which launched in 2017.
Since then, it has removed more than 12 tons of plastic and other waste from the South Devon coast using a recyclable boat and fleet of kayaks made from fishing nets.
Mr Joliffe said: “We specialise in getting to areas that are pretty hard to reach, so coves, underlying cliffs and that sort of area.”
Volunteer Rob Harris said: There is quite a lot [of litter] and my kids swim in the sea, they play on the beaches and if you think they are swimming around with all that in the sea … it’s quite depressing really.”
The whale and litter boom are expected to be installed in September.
Planting trees without plastic tree guards should be standard practice, a UK study has found, as leading conservation charities and landowners seek sustainable alternatives to reduce plastic waste.
The Woodland Trust has announced it is aiming to stop using plastic tree guards by the end of the year. It is trialling plastic-free options at its Avoncliff site in Wiltshire, including cardboard and British wool. The charity plans to plant 10 million trees each year until 2025.
Darren Moorcroft, chief executive of the Woodland Trust, said: “As one of the nation’s largest tree planters, by committing to go plastic-free in terms of the use of tree shelters, we are set to be the trailblazers in this field – catalysing a permanent change to the tree-planting world.”
Since the 1970s, saplings have generally been planted in translucent plastic tubes to protect them from being eaten by browsing animals. However, the research – which analysed the lifecycle of the plastic and trees – found it was better to lose a certain percentage of saplings than use plastic guards to protect them.
This is because there are significant carbon emissions from the manufacture of the guards, and they are rarely collected after use, meaning they break down into microplastics, polluting the natural environment and harming wildlife.
The UK’s independent climate advisory body has recommended increasing national forest cover from 13% to up to 19% by 2050, which the Woodland Trust equates to planting more than 1.5 billion trees.
The study, published in Science of the Total Environment, warned: “Mass planting of trees to fulfil the net zero targets could therefore entail a substantial amount of plastic tree shelters to be manufactured and left unrecovered in the environment.”
On average, 85% of trees with shelters survive, while 50% survive if no shelter is used, scientists found. This means to get one tree to the point of being established at five years, surviving into adulthood, you would have to plant 1.18 trees if using shelters and two trees without shelters. Rather than using tree guards to obtain a higher survival rate of saplings, scientists concluded that it was better for the environment to go plastic-free.
Best practice depends on location, and in areas with very high levels of damage by grazing animals such as rabbits, deer and sheep, the study found it was better to use tree guards.
Prof Mark Miodownik from University College London and one of the paper’s authors said: “Start with the premise you’re not going to use plastic tree guards. Use them if it’s the only feasible way to protect the trees in that location.
“We have an established practice of using tree guards and we couldn’t find any real evidence where anyone had carefully calculated the impacts of either scenario. Now we’ve done it, and what we showed is that you can manage the land in a different way.”
Analysis focused on data from the Woodland Trust’s reforestation efforts in the UK but scientists say the results are valid for other temperate oceanic regions. The most common afforestation strategy is to grow young trees in nurseries until they are between four months and three years old. Plastic tubes are generally designed to last for at least five years during the trees “establishment period”, after which survival rate is about 99%.
After this period, tree guards are generally left to degrade because it is cost-inefficient and time-consuming to collect and recycle them. It would be better if people recycled them, but in practice they become brittle and entangled in vegetation, shattering easily when pulled out.
Even if a shelter is collected and recycled, the carbon footprint of planting the tree is at least double that of plastic-free planting, the researchers found. Miodownik said: “We can’t have a solution that looks great but is creating lots of hidden CO2 emissions.”
The National Trust – which is among the biggest landowners in the country – aims to plant 20 million trees by 2030 and is testing sustainable alternatives to plastic guards, including using crates built from local diseased trees, cardboard tubes and using other shrubs such as gorse and hawthorn to protect saplings.
On the South Downs, the trust has used crates made from sweet chestnut collected from nearby. Each one can contain up to 20 saplings. They are time-consuming to construct but are robust and aesthetic to the surrounding landscape.
In Somerset, 6,000 cardboard tubes have been used as part of a two-year tree-planting programme. But with 40% needing to be replaced due to damage caused by animals and heavy wind and rain they are unlikely to be a long-term solution. Other options include natural protection with gorse or wooden fencing.
In Ennerdale, in the Lake District, the trust has used the brash from felled conifer trees to protect 20,000 native trees planted as part of a project to create more mixed woodland in the valley.
The rewilding approach of natural regeneration appears to work, but there is not much data on the success rate, and researchers did not examine this as part of the study.
“This is not the last word on this, this is the beginning of an evidence-based approach to planting trees,” said Miodownik. “The next generation will have to be the custodians of large forests, which have to be maintained and kept alive. I think working out how to do that is a skill.”
MONTREAL — Environmental experts are praising Montreal’s decision to ban some kinds of single-use plastics, but they say Canada is still a long way from being plastic-free despite government promises.
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante announced on Wednesday that the city would ban retailers and restaurants from distributing plastic bags in the city by end of August 2022. Six months later, a number of other single-use items will be banned, she said, including takeout food containers, cups, lids, utensils and stir sticks made from unrecyclable or hard-to-recycle plastics.
Plante described her city’s plan as the most ambitious in North America, and she said what sets it apart is the focus on reducing plastic at the source.
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“For some cities, recycling is priority No. 1,” she said. “For us, it’s reducing, reducing, reducing.” The mayor added that the urgency was heightened by the fact the city’s only landfill is expected to be full by 2029.
Ashley Wallis, a plastics pollution expert with environmental charity Oceana Canada, described Montreal’s initiative as a “great step,” and she had particular praise for the decision to include drink cups on the list of banned items — something other governments, including Ottawa, have stopped short of doing.
“We do know that 47 per cent of Canada’s plastic waste is from single-use plastics and plastics packaging, so I think there is a huge opportunity by focusing on things like these single-use takeaway items,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday.
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However, Wallis said that despite cities’ best efforts, Canada is still far away from a plastic-free future.
In 2019, the federal government announced it intended to ban several single-use plastic items, including plastic bags, straws, stir sticks, six-pack rings, cutlery and hard-to-recycle takeout containers — a list Wallis described as “too narrowly scoped.”
Ottawa has also promised to impose recycled-content requirements. As well, the federal government has discussed making some companies responsible for collecting their products made of plastic when they aren’t useful anymore, as part of a goal to achieve zero plastic waste by 2030. But those regulations, which were promised by end of 2021, have yet to be unveiled and could be derailed by the upcoming federal election, Wallis said.
Federal legislation on plastic ought to include takeout cups, she said, as well as all forms of polystyrene and oxo-degradable plastics, which break down quickly. Longer term, she said, what’s needed is a comprehensive, sector-by-sector plan to reduce and reuse plastic, with manufacturers being given the main responsibility for collection and recycling.
Even Montreal’s plan contains some omissions. It doesn’t include cardboard takeout containers with plastic coating and excludes non-profits that distribute food, for example. More importantly, it can’t affect anything outside the city’s jurisdiction, which includes grocery store items because they’re packaged outside city limits.
Environmental experts are praising Montreal’s decision to ban some kinds of single-use plastics, but they say Canada is still a long way from being plastic-free despite government promises. #PlasticBan #cdnpoli
Plante said she was hoping the city’s action would “influence in a very positive and proactive way the other levels of government.”
Karen Wirsig, the plastics program manager for advocacy group Environmental Defence, says more federal and provincial action is needed to push back against a plastics industry that is reluctant to change. The most effective way to do that, she said, is to “make the people who produce those things responsible for them at end of life,” and make sure they can’t just bury or burn them.
While that’s largely a provincial and federal effort, she said cities, too, have a role to play in plastic reduction.
In addition to banning plastic items, as Montreal has done, she said cities can create more local infrastructure to help businesses and restaurants offer reusable containers. “Nationwide standards are important. But for things like infrastructure, those really need to be local,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Wirsig acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic has represented a setback for plastic reduction efforts, but she said it was also an opportunity for creative thinking.
On one hand, takeout and online ordering have skyrocketed, creating more waste. Originally, the pandemic led to fears — now largely debunked, she said — that the disease could be spread on containers. On the other hand, she said the pandemic has also led many people to question their relationship to their local environments and they may be ready for positive change.
“There’s no question that the pandemic put us back, but I think it’s also been a moment where people are rethinking their relationship with their surroundings, their relationship with their local environment, and it may be a great moment to change some of those old ways we had,” she said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 19, 2021.
