Reuse your bags to limit their impact. Slip your reusable bags into your purse, car, gym bag so that you always have reusable bags with you. By doing this, you will contribute to a circular economy that respects the environment.
Adopt your new reusable bag
Wicker baskets, shopping nets, tote bags, etc., many sustainable alternatives exist and are now available to everyone. Not only ecological, but use them to make a statement about your commitment to the planet.
Bacteria found in one of the compartments of a cow’s stomach can break down plastic, research suggests.
Since the 1950s, more than 8bn tonnes of plastic have been produced – equivalent in weight to 1 billion elephants – driven predominantly by packaging, single-use containers, wrapping and bottles. As a result, plastic pollution is all-pervasive, in the water and in the air, with people unwittingly consuming and breathing microplastic particles. In recent years, researchers have been working on harnessing the ability of tiny microscopic bugs to break down the stubborn material.
There are existing microbes that are able to degrade natural polyester, found for example in the peels of tomatoes or apples. Given that cow diets contain these natural polyesters, scientists suspected the bovine stomach would contain a cornucopia of microbes to degrade all the plant material.
To test that theory, Dr Doris Ribitsch, of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, and her colleagues procured liquid from the rumen, a compartment of a cow’s stomach, from a slaughterhouse in Austria. One cow typically produces a rumen volume of about 100 litres, noted Ribitsch. “You can imagine the huge amount of rumen liquid accumulating in slaughterhouses every day – and it’s only waste.”
That liquid was incubated with the three types of polyesters – PET (a synthetic polymer commonly used in textiles and packaging); PBAT (biodegradable plastic often used in compostable plastic bags); and PEF (a biobased material made from renewable resources). Each plastic was tested in both film and powder form.
The results showed all three plastics could be broken down by the micro-organisms from cow stomachs in the lab setting, with the plastic powders breaking down quicker than plastic film. The next steps, she said, were to identify those microbes crucial to plastic degradation from the thousands present in the rumen, and then the enzymes produced by them. Once the enzymes have been identified, they can be produced and applied in recycling plants.
For now, plastic waste is mostly burned. To a lesser extent, it is melted for use in other products, but beyond a point it becomes damaged and can no longer be used again. Another method is chemical recycling – turning plastic waste back into base chemicals – but that is not an environmentally friendly process. Using enzymes is billed as a form of green chemical recycling.
Other researchers are further along in their quest to developing and scaling such enzymes. In September a super-enzyme was engineered by linking two separate enzymes, both of which were found in the plastic-eating bug discovered at a Japanese waste site in 2016.
The researchers revealed an engineered version of the first enzyme in 2018, which started breaking down the plastic in a few days. But the super-enzyme gets to work six times faster. Earlier in April, the French company Carbios revealed a different enzyme, originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, that degrades 90% of plastic bottles within 10 hours.
In the rumen liquid, it appears there is not just one type of enzyme present, but rather different enzymes working together to achieve degradation, the authors suggested in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
Carbios was working on scaling up its technology, noted Ribitsch. “But of course, it’s always good to have even better enzymes that are maybe recycling other polymers, not only PET, for example … so it can be seen as a general recycling material.”
A binding global treaty is needed to phase out the production of “virgin” or new plastic by 2040, scientists have said.
The solution to the blight of plastic pollution in the oceans and on land would be a worldwide agreement on limits and controls, they say in a special report in the journal Science.
Since the 1950s about 8bn tonnes of plastic has been produced. The effects are everywhere. One of the reports authors, Nils Simon, said: “Plastics are ubiquitously found in increasing amounts worldwide, including in terrestrial environments and even inside the human body.”
The authors say the very properties that have made plastic an apparently essential modern material also make it a serious environmental threat.
Sciencesenior editor Jesse Smith, writes: “As for much new technology, their development and proliferation occurred with little consideration for their impacts, but now it’s impossible to deny their dark side as we confront a rapidly growing plastic pollution problem.
“The time for preventing plastic pollution is long past – the time for changing the future of plastics in our world, however, is now.”
The report calls for a new global treaty “to cover the entire lifecycle of plastics, from the extraction of the raw materials needed for its manufacture to its legacy pollution”.
The largest proportion of plastic waste comes from packaging materials (47%), while textiles are responsible for 14% and transport 6%.
Each year, 3% of worldwide plastic waste ends up in the oceans; in 2010 that amounted to about 8m tonnes of plastic.
Yet plastic production has continued to increase. In 2019, 368m tonnes of newly made, or virgin, plastics were produced. By 2050, the production of new plastic from fossil fuels could consume 10-13% of the remaining global carbon budget permissible to ensure temperatures rise to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels as required by the Paris climate agreement.
Simon calls for a binding global treaty to:
Phase out the production of newly made or virgin plastic by 2040.
Create a circular economy for plastic, incentivising reuse and refill and the elimination of substantial volumes of plastic pollution.
Start a worldwide clean-up of plastic waste.
“Plastic pollution poses a considerable, even though not yet fully understood, threat to the environment, species, and habitats, as well as to cultural heritage,” said Simon. “Its social impacts include harm to human health, in particular among vulnerable communities, and it comes with substantial economic costs affecting especially regions depending on tourism.
“Addressing these challenges requires a transformative approach that facilitates measures to reduce production of virgin plastic materials and includes equitable steps toward a safe and circular economy for plastics.”
Cleaning up the vast plastic waste footprint spread across the world requires the targeting of clogged waterways, drains and sewers in many developing countries that do not have rubbish collection services and where creating and boosting waste management services would be necessary. Producers of plastic would also be required to contribute to help fund clean-ups in some countries.
The impact of plastic pollution on the environment could trigger negative impacts which are irreversible, the report’s authors warned.
Matthew MacLeod and his colleagues warned the plastic pollution of the oceans and land is at a rate which cannot be tackled by any cleanup, particularly when it affects remote areas. What is required is curtailing the emissions of plastic to the environment as rapidly and comprehensively as possible, they say.
A report by the NGO Tearfund last year revealed that just four companies, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Unilever were responsible for more than half a million tonnes of plastic pollution in six developing countries each year, enough to cover 83 football pitches every day.
Report authors Sarah Kakadellis and Gloria Rosetto say plastic waste is poorly managed and that by 2050 as much as 12,000m tonnes of it is likely to have accumulated in landfills or the natural environment.
The latest figures on the export of plastic waste reveal that a ban on exporting plastic to non-OECD countries from January 2021 is having little impact. Figures from the Basel Action Network, show the EU increased plastic waste exports from 30m kg a month in January 2021 to 41.1m kg a month in March 2021. Japan also increased exports from 22m kg a month in January 2021 to 51.4m kg a month in March 2021.
The scandals of plastic waste exports to developing countries were one example of the failure of mechanical recycling as an answer to the plastic pollution problem, said Kakadellis and Rosetto.
“Technology alone will not and cannot solve the plastic pollution crisis,” said the authors. “No silver-bullet solution exists for the multifaceted nature of plastic pollution. The answer instead lies in a blend of approaches … from a strong regulatory framework and the investment in effective waste collection and management infrastructure to the development of polymer chemistries, life-cycle design, and consumer behaviour.”
Muhammad Reza Cordova is searching for treasure amid the water bottles, plastic bags, and plastic foam cups that choke the beaches, reefs, and mangrove forests around Jakarta, Indonesia. In the microbe-rich slime coating some of that trash, he hopes to find organisms to help solve the vexing problem of what to do with the plastic flooding the planet.
Cordova, a marine biologist, collects samples of the slime and brings them back to his lab at Indonesia’s Research Center for Oceanography, where he plans to culture the microbes and feed them only plastic to see what thrives. “We are hoping that we find the most effective microbes that can eat or degrade the plastic,” he says.
Researchers across the globe are on the same quest. They are looking for plastic-munching microbes in searing hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, remote island beaches in the Pacific Ocean, and a plastic recycling factory in Japan, among other places. Some scientists have already found bacteria that wield enzymes able to break down a common plastic used to make water bottles and clothing.
The scientists think the microbes’ enzymes—proteins that speed chemical reactions—might help recycle some kinds of plastic, much of which gets buried in landfills, burned, or washed into rivers and oceans. Although industrial chemicals can break down plastics, using enzymes is potentially a greener approach, requiring less energy, that can also target specific plastics mixed with trash. “Nature is the most amazing recycler because it wastes nothing,” says John McGeehan, a structural biologist at the United Kingdom’s University of Portsmouth who leads an enzyme-hunting project that Cordova is part of.
A company in France is already building a demonstration factory that will use enzymes to turn plastic trash into raw material for new bottles. Scaling up further means overcoming major challenges, however. Finding enzymes is just a first step. Moving from the laboratory to a recycling factory requires overcoming technical and economic hurdles in an industry with razor-thin profits, and where new plastic can be cheaper than recycling. On top of that, the microbes largely fail to dent some of the most widespread plastics.
“Think about the sheer scale on which we manufacture plastics and the low value of these plastics,” says Susannah Scott, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is developing metal-based catalysts, synthesized in the laboratory, to recycle plastic. “It’s a tall order to ask biology to do that well.”
Plastic is in many ways a recycler’s nightmare. Built to last, plastic encompasses dozens of different molecules, made of long chains of carbon atoms. Those molecules all resist breaking apart, and each has distinct chemical properties that must be tackled differently. Often a single item—a potato chip bag, for example—is a maddening fusion of plastics, confounding the goal of easily extracting pure materials to develop a new product.
A small fraction of plastic is currently recycled, chiefly by sorting out usable types of plastic, melting them, and solidifying them again into pellets to be converted into lower grade plastics such as bags and artificial lumber. In 2014, just 19% of all plastic was being recycled, according to a 2017 study in Science Advances. Meanwhile, plastic production is expected to grow 70% by 2050, to almost 600 million tons per year.
Panoply of plastics
The millions of tons (Mt) of plastics produced each year include a vast array of materials tuned for different functions. Recycling processes vary depending on a plastic’s identity, so a mix often can’t be recycled together. But enzymes may be able to selectively break down a single plastic in a mix.
Other(75 Mt)•Touch screens•Optical fibers •Hub caps•Surgical devicesPolyethylene(116 Mt)•Sandwich bags •Trays and containers •Food packaging filmPolypropylene(68 Mt)•Food packaging •Snack wrappers•Microwavable containers•Automotive partsPolyethyleneterephthalate (33 Mt*)•Water bottles•Soft drink bottles •Cleaner bottlesPolyurethane(27 Mt)•Building insulation•Kitchen spongesPolyvinyl chloride (38 Mt)•Window frames •Cable insulation •Garden hoses •Inflatable poolsPolystyrene(25 Mt)•Dairy and meat packaging•Disposable cutlery*Total mass does not include that of polyester fibers in clothing.•Pillows and mattresses
V. Altounian/Science
The plastic that does go into recycling bins meets a variety of fates. Though some is reused, much is incinerated, buried in landfills, or dumped in the environment. Until recently, more than half the plastic collected in the United States was shipped overseas; of the shipped material, as much as one-quarter was too contaminated to be recycled, according to an estimate in a 2020 Science Advances study. In 2018, China stopped accepting most imported plastic waste, and U.S. recyclers reported sending unwanted bales of plastic to landfills. “We can’t keep buying more and more plastic, putting it into the blue bin, and feeling like that’s OK,” says Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who has worked to measure global plastic pollution.
Enzymes are an appealing solution. Unlike many industrial chemicals, enzymes work at relatively low temperatures and are choosy about which molecule they interact with—enabling an enzyme to target a single plastic in a stew of polymers. Scientists began hunting for such enzymes in earnest in 2016, after Japanese researchers analyzing mud near a plastic recycling factory found a bacterium with an unusual appetite for plastic. The organism produced two enzymes that together enabled it to feed on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) by breaking it into its building blocks, terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. PET is found in single-use drink bottles and fibers in polyester clothing, and it makes up about one-fifth of worldwide plastic production. Fabric is challenging to recycle today because it is often mixed with other materials. Although PET bottles are simpler, just 29% of PET bottles in the United States were recycled in 2018.
Before reading about the finding, McGeehan had been studying how organisms use enzymes to break down tough plant fibers. Now, he turned his eye to plastic, setting out to find other enzymes that could target polymers. He went on to recruit enzyme-hunting scientists in some of the world’s plastic pollution hot spots, thinking all the plastic trash might have led to the evolution of microbes that attack it. Indonesia is one place he’s looking, ranking second after China in one study examining sources of ocean-polluting plastic.
In Indonesia, in addition to collecting bacteria from plastic litter, Cordova plans to delve into the muck at the roots of mangrove trees. Microbes that originally fed on tough mangrove leaves would have had decades to evolve the ability to break down the plastic bags that cling to the roots. He will also suspend small tags of various plastics in Jakarta Bay to see whether any microscopic creatures start to feed on them.
Any promising microbial candidates that Cordova finds will be shipped to McGeehan’s lab. His team crystallizes promising enzymes, then uses x-ray crystallography to peer into their structures, deciphering how they bind to polymers and help break their chemical links. The work has already yielded insights about which enzyme shapes hold the most promise. PET-breaking enzymes, for example, have a valley in their surface into which the plastic molecule nestles. There, a distinctive trio of amino acids attacks the molecular bond joining units of the polymer.
Coming full circle
Scientists are engineering enzymes to recycle plastic. These modified versions of natural proteins work at relatively low temperatures, target specific plastics in a mixture, and produce pure monomers that can then form new plastic.
123451 A popular targetfor recycling isPET, a polymer indrink bottles andpolyester clothing.2 PET consists oflong strands madefrom monomersof ethylene glycol andterephthalic acid.3 Enzymes that digestPET include the bacterialenzyme PETase, whichbreaks the polymer’soxygen-carbon bonds.4 The resultingmonomers getbroken into theirconstituents by asecond enzyme,MHETase.5 Those products,ethylene glycoland terephthalicacid, can be madeinto PET againwith heat, pressure,and catalysts.Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)Breaking bondsPET is held together by bondsbetween carbon and oxygen,which require less energy tobreak in a chemical reactionthan those formed by linksbetween two carbon atoms.Those bonds, found in manycommon plastics such aspolyethylene and polypropylene,are harder to break.PETPolypropylenePETaseenzymeMHETaseenzymeC–OC–CDiscarded bottles
V. Altounian/Science
Using that information, McGeehan and others are scouring databases of bacterial genomes for DNA sequences that code for similar molecules, signaling potential plastic-cracking enzymes. Researchers in his lab then use computers to model how the proteins might be artificially improved. The goal is to modify the genes that encode the natural enzymes to make them into powerful plastic-busting tools. Already the team has altered the enzyme uncovered by the Japanese researchers to make it more efficient. “We’re not looking for superenzymes from nature. That’s pretty unlikely,” McGeehan says. “We’re just looking for enzymes that tickle plastic.”
His group isn’t the only one on the hunt. A consortium of European and Chinese labs is also working to find and cultivate bacteria whose enzymes break down plastic—and other enzymes that can turn the breakdown products into valuable chemicals. A group of researchers from Germany, France, and Ireland that included members of the consortium recycled PET by using a modified version of an enzyme found in a compost pile that takes apart the waxy layer on leaves. A strain of lab-evolved bacteria then used the raw materials to build two new kinds of plastic.
If those quests succeed, some plastics might be recycled by washing them in enzymes, much as enzyme-based detergents break down food stains in dirty clothes, says Gregg Beckham, a chemical engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Beckham heads a $32 million DOE initiative to develop new plastic recycling methods and collaborates with McGeehan on the enzyme search. In late May, NREL scientists gathered to test a scheme in which enzymes would help soldiers turn their plastic trash into building blocks for battlefield essentials.
The vision is “a box … where they could put in plastic and other types of waste, like paper. And out the back of it would come something like food or gun oil,” Beckham says of the project, which is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
As with many DARPA projects, the research is a long way from practical deployment. Scientists at the NREL lab in Golden, Colorado, cut sheets of PET plastic into small squares. The squares were submerged in a brew of warm water, salt, and a version of the leaf-digesting enzyme found in compost, altered by French researchers to bind more tightly with the plastic and withstand higher temperatures.
When the Colorado researchers returned 24 hours later, 84% of the plastic had dissolved—suggesting the enzyme had broken the plastic down into smaller molecules. Beckham’s target is to break down 95% of 5 kilograms of plastic in 1 month, he says. “We’ll blow that out of the water.”
After 48 hours with an enzyme that breaks down the plastic polyethylene terephthalate, it loses nearly 98% of its mass (right).
DENNIS SCHROEDER
The French company that developed the enzyme, Carbios, plans to build the world’s first enzyme-fueled plastic recycling factory. The endeavor will start with a small demonstration plant in the city of Clermont-Ferrand to test the enzyme’s ability to convert plastic trash into raw material for new PET plastic. The company says it will open a full-scale factory in 2024 with a goal of producing the ingredients for 40,000 tons of recycled plastic each year.
Such enzymes might not break the recycling logjam. They work best on plastic made from carbon atoms joined by an oxygen atom. Such polymers, called polyesters, are also found in plant fibers, which bacteria have had millions of years to evolve to feed on.
By contrast, plastics with bonds linking carbon atoms directly are tougher. Representing more than half of plastics made, they include the polyethylene of ubiquitous grocery bags and the polypropylene that forms a dizzying array of products, as diverse as syrup bottles and car dashboards.
In recent years, scientists have reported organisms that can feed on such plastics, including larvae of wax moths. But Beckham and others doubt the chemical talents of those organisms will translate into practical recycling of polyethylene or polypropylene.
Enzymes can be finicky, failing at the high temperatures needed to coax chemical reactions in many plastics other than PET. Enzymes also tend to work more slowly than industrial chemicals, Scott says, making them inefficient. “You’re always coming back to the techno-economic analysis,” says George Huber, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, who heads a DOE-funded research project on recycling plastic into high-value products. “The economics dominate everything.”
That’s true for all enzymatic recycling methods. The raw materials—natural gas and oil—that go into most plastic are relatively cheap. Even if a recycled material were cheap enough to compete with a new one, it would have to be integrated into a vast manufacturing infrastructure and meet the exacting demands of companies buying plastics, says William Banholzer, a chemical engineer who was chief technology officer until 2014 at Dow, one of the world’s largest plastic manufacturers. “The truth is, recycling still is too expensive and gives crappier products,” says Banholzer, now at UW.
Amid a growing public outcry over plastic pollution, major chemical companies are investing in new forms of plastic recycling. But those approaches rely largely on industrial chemicals. In January, two major petrochemical companies, Eastman Chemical Company and SABIC, a subsidiary of the oil and gas giant Saudi Aramco, each announcedplans to build factories using chemical treatments to turn plastic trash into materials to help make new plastics.
SABIC’s chief technology and sustainability officer, Bob Maughon, says enzyme-boosted reactions move too slowly for plastic recycling. At the moment, “I think enzymatic is not realistic,” he says.
But Alain Marty, a biologist and chief scientific officer for Carbios, says he is confident his company’s enzyme-based approach can chew through PET fast enough to find a place in the market. Although the first factory probably won’t compete with the price of unrecycled raw materials, companies will pay a premium for recycled plastic that can be sold to environmentally conscious consumers, he says. “It is another product, and there is a great demand.”
Despite Beckham’s excitement about enzymes, he says he is agnostic about whether they will win out over other new ways to recycle. The DOE project he oversees is also investigating using heat, light, and electricity to break down plastics. Whatever the method, he just wants to see an increase in the fraction of plastic that goes into his recycling bin and really gets recycled. “My hope,” Beckham says, “is that our recycle bins become much, much bigger.”
Have you ever wondered how scientists even begin to study things like patterns in ocean pollution and movements of microplastics? Better yet, you can probably imagine the people working the hardest to fight these problems could benefit from useful information like being able to track where a majority of microplastics come from in the first place? Surprisingly, initial methods to keep tabs on such things rely on reports from plankton trawlers, according to a new report from the University of Michigan, and those same researchers have introduced the use of some far more advanced machinery for their work: satellites.
The new tracking method employed by the UM team is taking data from a system of eight micro-satellites that were launched in 2016 to track storms. Creating measurements for what they’re calling “ocean surface roughness,” they were able to find a correlation between radar measurements used to track wind speed and the existing data from plankton trawlers and ocean current models already used to predict the movement of microplastics.
“Areas of high microplastic concentration, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, exist because they’re located in convergence zones of ocean currents and eddies. The microplastics get transported by the motion of the water and end up collecting in one place,” says Chris Ruf, the Frederick Bartman Collegiate Professor of Climate and Space Science at UM. “Surfactants behave in a similar way, and it’s very likely that they’re acting as sort of a tracer for the microplastics.”
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One of the team’s headline-making findings with this new tracking method is that concentrations of microplastics in a body of water can vary by season. For example, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch shrinks to its smallest size in January, the thick of the Northern Hemisphere winter. Six months later, microplastic concentrations are at their highest in the exact same region come summer. Meanwhile, the same cycle is flipped in the Southern Hemisphere. The researchers’ hope is that straightforward data like this can direct an organization like the Ocean Cleanup, helping them know when and where to deploy their resources. The same discovery also helped UM researchers narrow down some of the greatest sources of microplastic flow into the ocean, like China’s Yangtze River.
“It’s one thing to suspect a source of microplastic pollution, but quite another to see it happening,” Ruf said. “The microplastics data that has been available in the past has been so sparse, just brief snapshots that aren’t repeatable.”
Next up, the researchers are testing hypotheses from their findings and conducting experiments in a wave-generating tank to learn the relationship between surface roughness and the presence of microplastics. Small wins that they hope add up to big gains in fighting a gigantic environmental problem.
erring gull eggs have been found to be contaminated with chemical additives used in plastic production, researchers said.
A study looked for evidence of phthalates – a group of chemicals added to plastics to keep them flexible – in newly laid herring gull eggs.
The research by the universities of Exeter and Queensland found up to six types of phthalate per egg.
The chemicals function as pro-oxidants – potentially causing oxidative stress that can damage cells.
Unfortunately, our findings suggest that mothers are inadvertently passing on phthalates and products of lipid damage
Professor Jon Blount, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall said: “Herring gull mothers pass on vital nutrients to their offspring via their eggs.
“This includes lipids that nourish developing embryos, and vitamin E, which helps to protect chicks from oxidative stress that can occur during development and at hatching.
“Unfortunately, our findings suggest that mothers are inadvertently passing on phthalates and products of lipid damage – and eggs with higher phthalate contamination also contained greater amounts of lipid damage and less vitamin E.”
The researchers say the impact of their findings on developing chicks is not yet known, and further research is needed.
They collected 13 herring gulls eggs from sites in Cornwall and all 13 were found to contain phthalates.
Phthalates – which are used in most plastic products and readily leech out – can build up in living organisms by becoming concentrated in fatty tissues.
While the study does not show where the gulls acquired the phthalates, they have been previously found in species preyed on by herring gulls, and the birds are known to swallow plastic.
More research is now needed to discover how developing offspring are affected by being exposed to phthalates before they have even emerged as a hatchling
Prof Blount said: “Research on the impact of plastic on animals has largely focused on entanglement and ingestion of plastic fragments.
“Far less is known about the impacts of plastic additives on the body.
“By testing eggs, our study gives us a snapshot of the mother’s health – and it appears phthalate contamination could be associated with increased oxidative stress, and mothers transfer this cost to their offspring via the egg.
“More research is now needed to discover how developing offspring are affected by being exposed to phthalates before they have even emerged as a hatchling.”
The study received an initiator grant from QUEX, and is published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.
NEW BEDFORD — Walk by a salt marsh and you’ll see tall grasses, a glassy water surface and perhaps a few local bird species. By sight alone, the marsh may appear to be in its natural state.
According to a new study, though, some marshes — built up for years and years by layers of sediment — contain countless plastic fragments and fibers under their surfaces, some so tiny they’re only visible through a microscope.
Javier Lloret, a research scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and a lead author, said the study is the first step in considering what implications microplastics have for salt marshes.
“Humans are the ones producing these plastics that ultimately will break up into little tiny pieces, become microplastics and contaminate our environment,” Lloret said. “So one of the hypotheses that we started with was the idea of, if you have more people living in an area, if the area is more densely urbanized, the salt marshes in that area are going to have more microplastics in the sediment. It makes total sense from a common sense point of view, but it had not been tested yet.”
And that’s what they found: the more urbanized the surrounding land was, the more microplastic fragments they found in the salt marsh sediment.
For the study, researchers took sediment cores from salt marshes in Cape Cod and New Bedford. Each marsh had a different level of watershed development and population density, with the New Bedford site being the most urbanized.
While they found microplastic fragments and fibers in all sampling sites, they found a link between the number of fragments and level of urbanization. Specifically, the abundance of microplastic fragments in sediment samples increased as the degree of urban development on adjoining land increased.
What was consistent across sites, though, was the amount of microplastic fibers — the material released from synthetic clothing or fishing gear. Regardless of the level of urbanization, fibers were equally abundant in the samples, Lloret said.
Due to this distinction, Lloret believes fragments have a local source, whereas fibers may be sourced from the region as they can be transported more easily by wind or water.
Reconstructing the history of microplastics
At two of the Cape Cod sites, the scientists took deeper sediment cores to trace when plastic started appearing in the salt marsh.
About 30 centimeters deep took them to the early 1940s, Lloret said, when plastic was rare and not widely used. While studying the cores, they found the number of microplastics increased dramatically closer to the surface.
“In the last 25 years, the number of [plastic] particles you find in the sediments was doubled,” he said. “If we continue these trends, in just a matter of another decade we can have a lot more microplastics, and the impacts that we’re still trying to figure out can be even worse.”
What does this mean for salt marshes?
Salt marshes are important ecosystems. They provide habitats for numerous species (including shellfish some people enjoy eating), protect coastlines against storm surges and sea level rise, and sequester carbon, Lloret said.
They also act as effective “sinks,” with the grasses capturing materials — be it plant matter, dirt or plastic — and depositing it on the base of the marsh.
Lloret said this study was just the first step. It confirmed salt marshes contain microplastics and that levels are linked to human activity. However, the “million dollar question” that remains is what the presence of microplastics means for the health and functionality of the ecosystem.
Filter feeders like mussels and clams don’t differentiate between a particle of food or a microplastic, Lloret said. If they consume plastic, it can affect their health as well as that of human consumers.
“I’m very interested in the effects that it’s going to have in the food web, because those food webs are responsible for the functioning of the entire ecosystem,” he said. “That’s the kind of direction that I would like to go with this.”
Until he and other researchers untangle those big questions, Lloret said municipalities and the state can consider actions, such as educating residents on recycling or establishing regulations that bar certain synthetic materials.
The bottom line, though, is trying to use less things that are made of plastic, he said.
Standard-Times reporter Anastasia E. Lennon can be reached at alennon@s-t.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @aelennon1. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Standard-Times today.
The report, which was not peer-reviewed, assessed four recycling and plastic waste management techniques that are poised to become more common as countries, including Canada, try to reduce plastic pollution. It found the main solutions promoted by the plastic industry — recycling, incineration, and transforming plastic into fuel — will increase people’s risk of exposure to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.
Most plastic products contain toxic chemicals added to give plastic desirable traits, like flexibility or non-stick properties. When they are broken down during recycling or incineration, these toxins — everything from endocrine disrupters to cancer-causing chemicals — can escape recycling facilities and landfills to contaminate people and the environment
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“It doesn’t matter which of those methods you choose. The toxic additives in plastic are creating exposure to the point where it’s a detriment to human health,” said Lee Bell, report co-author and policy adviser on persistent organic pollutants to the International Pollutant Elimination Network (IPEN), an international coalition of environmental organizations that produced the study.
That problem is exacerbated by recycling and other waste management techniques. For instance, chemical recycling — a suite of processes that break plastic down into its molecular components to make new products — produces a sludge of concentrated toxins. Techniques that transform plastic into fuel or to burn it to produce heat or electricity have similar issues, the report notes.
The sludge or ash produced during these processes is typically put in landfills, used in landscaping or road construction, or spewed directly into the environment. Bell explained that, over time, these toxins end up leaching into the environment and contaminating soil, water, and the food chain.
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Mechanical recycling — a common technique where old plastic is shredded and melted into new products — also concentrates toxic additives in the new products. Beyond the dangers the final products present to human health, the technique is expensive and struggles to compete with new plastics, Bell said.
The problem is poised to get exponentially worse, with oil and gas companies anticipating that plastic production will make up the bulk of their future growth as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. Annual global plastic production is expected to more than quadruple in the next 30 years to reach 1.8 billion tonnes in 2050, according to the report.
“That production schedule will swamp any attempts to deal with (plastic waste) from a recycling perspective,” Bell said. “The only way you can try to bring that into some sort of equilibrium is to try and cap production.”
Yet countries have been reluctant to curb production.
For instance, earlier this year, Canada listed plastic as toxic under its primary environmental law. The move was the first step in the federal government’s proposed plan to end plastic waste. Under the proposal, some single-use items would be banned and other restrictions implemented to boost Canada’s recycling capacity roughly six-fold by 2030.
Efforts to end plastic pollution with recycling could leave people — and the environment — laden with poisonous chemicals, a new study has found. #Plastics
Only about nine per cent of Canada’s plastic is recycled, mostly using mechanical recycling, according to a 2019 study commissioned by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). The remainder goes to landfills, is incinerated, or leaks into the environment.
However, despite the decision to list plastic as toxic, the Trudeau government has yet to limit plastic production.
“(ECCC) is working…to implement a comprehensive agenda for zero plastic waste by 2030. We are also taking action to develop recycled content standards and to hold producers responsible for their plastic waste. This approach seeks to transition Canada away from a linear economy that disposes of plastic as waste, and towards a circular economy that keeps plastic in the economy and out of the environment… Proposed regulations to prohibit or restrict certain harmful single-use plastics will be published for public comment later this year,” said Moira Kelly, press secretary to Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, in a statement.
“Unless we have a global treaty that limits plastic production in the same way the Paris Agreement seeks to limit carbon emissions, we are not going to be able to come up with a circular economy,” Bell noted. In a circular economy, plastic couldn’t contain toxic additives to make it more easily recyclable. It would also need to be limited to medical devices and other essential uses.
“I don’t think it’s that far away, but we’re being held up by the petrochemical and fossil fuel companies from reaching that point,” he said. “The one thing they don’t want to hear is limits on production because if they can’t use (oil) as fuel and they can’t pump it into plastics production, they’ve got a problem.”
For weeks at a time, crews have been scouring remote sections of the West Coast — digging out massive fishing nets, hauling lines, tossing thousand of buoys and shifting mountains of Styrofoam to try to make a dent in the ocean refuse finding its way onto B.C.’s wildest shores.
A shocking 210 tonnes of flotsam and plastic detritus was removed over six weeks from a mere 300 kilometres of the province’s intricate 25,000-kilometre shoreline during this year’s massive cleanup of the ecologically sensitive foreshores of the Great Bear Rainforest.
“It’s just perpetual. It just keeps washing ashore,” said Scott Benton, executive director of the Wilderness Tourism Association.
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“It’s a huge volume of garbage. And a very small portion of the coast when you consider how many kilometres of coastline there is in B.C.”
The industrial-scale effort involved a fleet of nine small-ship ecotourism vessels crewed by 150 people who would have otherwise been out of work this May and June due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Benton said.
The undertaking also required an immense barge, a helicopter, a contingent of small boats and partnerships with the Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Gitga’at, Haisla, and Gitxaala nations.
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Wilderness tourism staff collected fishing nets, thousands of buoys and mountains of Styrofoam to try to make a dent in the ocean refuse finding its way onto B.C.’s wildest shores. Photo Jeff Reynolds
But the results speak for themselves as the enterprise, benefiting from previous experience, managed to almost double the 127 tonnes of trash picked up last spring during the inaugural launch of the provincial initiative, Benton said.
In April, the province backed the initiative again, divvying up $9.5 million from the Clean Coast, Clean Waters Fund to four groups or associations in an effort to remove garbage from 1,200 kilometres of shore, or more than 100 derelict vessels along the north coast down to southern Vancouver Island.
In addition to providing pandemic relief to the embattled wilderness tourism sector, the project was a response to the call for action around marine debris from coastal communities, said Environment Minister George Heyman.
“It can feel like you’re putting a Band-Aid on an artery,” says Quadra Islander Breanne Quesnel on collecting marine debris. “But we live in this this beautiful place, and you just want to do what what you can to help, rather than hurt it.”
Local governments and resident complaints involved derelict vessels, mooring buoys, polystyrene foam, aquaculture and fishing debris, and single-use plastics, he added.
“The scale of the problem is massive, and we need to do much more to address ocean debris and its devastating impacts on marine life and food sources,” Heyman said.
The vast majority of the ocean trash being removed from B.C.’s pristine shores is plastic, said Jeff Reynolds, a biologist and guide with Maple Leaf Adventures, who has been involved in the cleanup both years.
Each year, globally, about eight million tonnes of plastic waste enters oceans. This translates to the dumping of a garbage truck of plastic into the sea every single minute.
“It’s not just local, the debris is from all over the world,” Reynolds said.
The gruelling work to collect it involved scrambling over rough terrain and tangled masses of driftwood to shift, pile, and sort garbage before loading it onto boats headed for the barge, or for pick up by helicopter directly from the beach.
By weight, 50 per cent of what he and his crew mates wrestled from the shores exposed to the Pacific was nylon fishing nets or lines, Reynolds said. In terms of volume, crumbling foam from docks or floats, along with plastic buoys or floats, were the most common offenders.
And then there were the ubiquitous plastic bottles. The team likely picked up around 90,000 of them, he said.
Reynolds was heartened that this year rather than just dumping the debris in landfills, roughly 60 per cent of it was sorted for recycling. And despite the labour involved, the effort was worth more than just getting a paycheque during the pandemic, he said.
“We all really care for this coast,” he said. “And there’s been a real incredible response, and I’ve enjoyed being part of such an impactful program.”
Quadra Island Beach Clean Dream Team
Quadra Island resident Breanne Quesnel and her sons Eamon and Rowan sort marine debris gathered by community volunteers. Photo by Rochelle Baker
The past two years, the Clean Coast initiative has been the largest organized effort to clean the province’s shores in B.C. history.
Yet for decades, most of the heavy lifting to clean B.C.’s beaches is typically done by community volunteers or non-profit groups (ENGOs) that often face funding, infrastructure or workforce hurdles.
And the pandemic hasn’t made coastal community efforts to protect shorelines any easier, but some groups persevered regardless.
When Quadra Island resident Breanne Quesnel saw her community’s annual spring beach cleanup cancelled due to COVID-19 for a second year, she felt she could help.
Loads of dedicated individuals were still gathering garbage, but without the annual organized effort, there wasn’t anywhere to put it or any way to get a large amount of debris off the island, said Quesnel, co-owner of Spirit of the West Kayaking.
So, Quesnel reached out to the regional waste management authority and collaborated to put a 40-yard collection bin in the parking lot of her business.
With the costs covered by the regional waste authority, she helped set up a depot where islanders could sort and pile recyclables, and dump the rest of the debris for transport off island.
“You know, we’re just a private entity, and we could provide the facility and some labour to help,” she said.
“There are so many incredible volunteers on Quadra who have been busy collecting debris and stashing it, but needed a place to put it.”
Quadra Island resident Nevil Hand organized the Facebook Quadra Island Beach Clean Dream Team so volunteers could co-operate to clean beaches during COVID-19. Photo courtesy Nevil Hand
Nevil Hand, a retired firefighter, is one of the volunteers consistently walking the island’s shores.
Frustrated that the pandemic had quashed yet another community cleanup, he organized a Facebook group, the Quadra Island Beach Clean Dream Team, as one way to organize and collaborate with other individual volunteers.
“My motto is: Pick up what you can, where you can, when you can,” Hand said.
People typically put the bigger beach trash in piles for pickup or use the social media group to communicate with one another about where they have cleaned.
While the dumpster on the island has made things easier, it’s still a challenge to get any level of government to deal with larger items residents can’t manage due to lack of proper equipment or transport.
Case in point is an enormous industrial marine bumper that washed ashore on one of the island’s remote beaches in the early spring and has yet to be removed by authorities or its owner.
The structure is at least 60 feet long and made from loader tires and huge steel girders, he said.
“It’s still there,” Hand said.
“There’s no accountability. Government doesn’t want to find them and industries leave all their crap up and down the coast and let somebody else deal with it.”
Quadra Islanders want more accountability from industry when it comes to cleaning up marine debris. Photo courtesy of Nevil Hand
As a mom and business owner that benefits from the coast’s spectacular wilderness, Quesnel said making an effort is necessary despite the enormity of the ocean’s plastic problem.
“It can feel like you’re putting a Band-Aid on an artery,” Quesnel said.
“When you’re watching your kids play on the beach, you wonder what the ocean will be like when they’re older.
“But we live in this beautiful place, and you just want to do what you can to help, rather than hurt it.”
Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
