Single-use plastic items including straws and some takeaway packaging are banned in NSW from today, forcing businesses to transition towards more environmentally friendly products made from materials such as bamboo and paper.
Key points:
Single-use plastic items such as straws, plates and bowls are banned from November 1
Biodegradable alternatives such as cardboard will still end up in landfill
Work is underway to create safer compostable alternative products for consumers to use
But new EPA regulations mean these “eco” alternatives cannot currently be composted and will end up in landfill like their plastic counterparts.
The NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) recently clarified its guidelines around what was allowed in green compost bins, banning items such as cardboard and certified compostable packaging after research found that some products contained chemicals like PFAS, which can be harmful to human and animal health.
More than 40 councils in NSW currently run compostable food and organic waste (FOGO) programs and all councils in the state will need to adopt FOGO schemes by 2030.
But for NSW Far South Coast cafe owner Peter Haggar, restricting items such as cardboard and compostable packaging from FOGO bins will make the transition away from single-use plastics problematic.
“They’ve sort of closed a door on a way out, or an exit route, from single-use plastics,” he said.
“They’re going to have to do something about it because single-use plastics aren’t just [used] in hospitality. They’re also in medicine in a big way.”
A ban on items such as single-use plastic straws came into effect on November 1.(ABC News: Meagan Dillon)
What is now banned?
Single-use plastic items such as straws, cutlery, stirrers, plates and bowls without spill-proof lids, and containers made from expanded polystyrene are now all banned.
The NSW EPA will enforce the plastic bans, with fines of up to $55,000 for corporations and $11,000 for individuals if they are caught supplying or using the items.
These penalties will be doubled for a manufacturer, distributor or wholesaler.
Compostable plastic items, known as bioplastics, have also been banned.
Compostable bioplastics can break down into harmful microplastics.(Supplied: University of Newcastle: Maddison Carbery)
Ravi Naidu from the University of Newcastle said even certified compostable bioplastics can be harmful to the environment.
“There has been work conducted that shows that bioplastics can break down into micro or nano plastics,” he said, adding that there was research underway to create bioplastics that don’t break down into toxic materials,” Professor Naidu said.
“The work that has been done so far is good but there is more that we need to do.
“Nothing will be delivered until there is serious investment.”
Compostable packaging that was previously allowed in FOGO is no longer permitted.(ABC South East NSW: Keira Proust)
Work underway to improve compostable products
A spokesperson for the EPA said work was underway by the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation to improve the safety of compostable products.
“As new evidence demonstrates significant gains, the EPA may reconsider its position,” they said.
“All Australian governments have agreed that further release of PFAS into the environment from ongoing use should be prevented where practicable.”
Councils manage all waste, including organic material for compost, across NSW.(ABC South East NSW: Keira Proust)
Mr Haggar said it was urgent that solutions to the disposable waste problem were found quickly.
“We need to find a way to compost everything,” he said.
“A lot of businesses like mine will continue to use compostable packaging and push governments to put in place standards to make that compostable packaging PFAS-free.”
On Tuesday, Australia takes another step towards reshaping its throw-away society.
A range of single-use plastic, including straws, cutlery and micro beads in shampoo, will be banned in its most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), in a bid to reduce waste.
“Australia has been very active over the last few years in moving to ban single-use plastics. We now have bans in place in over half of Australia’s states and territories,” says Shane Cucow, the plastics campaign manager at the Australian Marine Conservation Society.
“It’s been incredible progress considering just two years ago not a single state and territory had banned single-use plastics.”
Australia has complex record with plastic waste. Though it has long been accused of inaction, the country has also seen celebrated examples of leadership.
One of the forefathers of the anti-waste movement was Ian Kiernan, a Sydney-born property developer who became a professional yachtsman.
In the 1980s, he had an environmental epiphany in the waters of the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean during a solo race around the world.
“He was horrified by the amount of pollution, particularly plastic,” explains one of his daughters, Pip. “So, that was the impetus to come back and do something about it.”
In 1989, Ian Kiernan launched Clean Up Sydney Harbour, a community effort to tackle litter in one of the world’s most famous waterways.
“He was worrying that no-one would turn up, but 40,000 Sydneysiders turned up,” Ms Kiernan tells the BBC.
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A year later it became a national event, and Clean Up Australia Day was born.
“It is absolutely quintessentially Australian in that we are great volunteers but we don’t like being told what to do. Clean Up Australia is about empowering you. You chose where you clean up. We’ll give you the tools,” adds Ms Kiernan, who’s the chair of the organisation her father set up, which attracts a million volunteer waste warriors each year.
“He’d be encouraged to see that we are phasing out problematic single-use plastic items. But he would equally be frustrated that we are still producing and wasting so much plastic across the world.”
In June, NSW banned lightweight plastic bags. Other items included in Tuesday’s ban include single-use plastic drink stirrers and cotton buds, as well as expanded polystyrene containers for take-away food.
Queensland will disallow many of these products in September 2023, along with heavyweight plastic shopping bags under a proposed “five-year roadmap”. Victoria will act sooner, and will ban “problematic single-use plastics from sale or supply” from 1 February 2023.
The pace of legislative reform might be impressive, but Australia’s mission to tame its plastic waste problem has a long way to go.
“We’re just at the start of our journey. Across the board Australia’s plastic packaging recycling rate is still just 16%. Our national target is 70%,” Mr Cucow says. “So, we are a very long way from actually recovering and recycling all of our plastic in Australia.
“Australia is so far behind in terms of recycling our plastic packaging and one of the big barriers is soft plastics, which are very difficult to recycle. That’s a legacy of decades of neglect.”
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A global comparison of plastics waste management placed Australia 7th among 25 nations for its overall efforts to control plastic pollution, behind European countries, Japan, the UK and the US. Australia was rated 1st for “promoting safe and informed plastic usage” but 16th for “efficient collection and sorting channels”, said the report released in October last year.
About a third of Australians live in NSW. The state’s environment minister, James Griffin, has acknowledged the challenges that lie ahead.
“The amount of plastic in our oceans is predicted to outweigh the amount of fish by 2050. That is a horrifying prediction and a call to action to ensure our wildlife… can have a brighter future,” he said.
Mr Griffin asserted the state’s bans would “prevent 2.7 billion items of plastic litter from entering the environment over the next 20 years”.
In June, Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, reported some good news that plastic pollution littering the coast had fallen by 29% compared to 2013.
For Britta Denise Hardesty, a senior principal research scientist in its Oceans and Atmosphere unit, it was a “heartening” discovery and a sign that government policies were working.
“We are starting to see a real change in our relationship with plastic,” she told the BBC, noting a “really big shift” in state government practices, including buy-back or cash-for-containers schemes reward individuals for recycling bottles and other items.
“We are starting to put a price on plastic where we actually treat plastic as a valuable item, as a commodity rather than just as waste. Think about aluminium. It has intrinsic value and we don’t tend to find it lost to the environment,” she said.
“I don’t foresee that we are going to have a plastic-free future. I’d like to see us designing with a legacy mindset, designing products for longer-term and thinking about what is the next life of that product going to be.”
For Pip Kiernan, her late father’s mission goes on more than 30 years after it began.
“He predicted all those years ago that plastics would be the scourge for our generation and he was right,” she says.
As plastic litter degrades in the sun, it breaks down into tiny pieces that are then consumed by the wildlife. Image: NOAA
By Nicoline Bradford
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee have discovered that plastic pollution makes yellow perch less nutritious.
Microplastics are pieces of plastic smaller than five millimeters, about the width of an eraser, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They break down from larger pieces or they are made that size for a specific purpose such as microbeads used in hygiene products. They are a common form of pollutant and can harm wildlife.
Fish are extremely susceptible to changes in their environment and food, said Dong-Fang Deng, a nutritionist and one of the lead researchers. Each ingredient can be a potential stressor that can jeopardize the health and quality of the fish.
While this study was of juvenile yellow perch, other studies suggest that the nutritional value of other species could also be harmed by plastic. The small size of the juvenile yellow perch allowed the results to be observed faster.
Yellow perch are an extremely popular food fish and ecologically important to the Great Lakes, the study said. In recent years, a decline in their population has driven interest in commercial yellow perch farming. Plastics used on fish farms in holding tanks, pipes, aeration lines and packing bags are potential sources of microplastic contamination of fish, the study said.
Most farmed fish rely on fishmeal for protein, Deng said. This meal is usually made from small fish caught in the ocean, another route of contamination.
“If the fish used for the fishmeal are from water polluted with plastics, it becomes a pathway for the microplastics to enter the feed of the perch,” Deng said. There are other pathways, such as the PVC piping in the aquaculture system, but this study focused on the effects of microplastics in the feed.
Researchers supplemented the perch feed with high-density polyethylene, an extremely common plastic often detected in fishmeal.
Unlike other pollutants, microplastics eventually pass through the digestive tract of the fish. While the researchers did not find any microplastic buildup in the fish’s body, the plastic caused a lower protein content in their muscles. The researchers theorized that this was because the fish spent more energy and nutrients to remove the plastic from their systems.
Miicroplastic added to fish food didn’t impact the growth of the fish but their protein and mineral content decreased. Image: Chronic exposure to high-density polyethylene microplastic through feeding alters the nutrient metabolism of juvenile yellow perch (Perca flavescens), June 2022.
In addition to less protein, researchers also found less minerals in the fish fed food containing plastic.
“So even though you don’t directly see the harm, there are long-term impacts to the nutritional quality of the fish,” Deng said.
“People shouldn’t be worried about eating fish because of microplastics,” Deng said. “We did not find any microplastic buildup in the fish muscle.”
The size of the fish and the size of the microplastic affect how the fish will be impacted and how easily it can flush the plastic from its body.
Deng said that the study was relatively short and they fed the perch high levels of plastic. While this may not occur in a natural environment, similar results are produced by the fish being exposed to smaller amounts of microplastics in the water every day for years, she said.
“Even if we are able to decrease, or even eliminate plastic from polluting our water, the damage is already done and the impact will be long-lasting,” said Osvaldo Jhonatan Sepulveda Villet, an assistant professor at the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
“There’s really no organism out there that readily degrades plastics,” Villet said. Even if it passes through the fish, the microplastics are still in the environment.
It’s nearly impossible to prevent plastic from entering the environment. Once it is in the water, the plastics easily end up in the fish’s environment and food, Villet said.
Villet said that it is possible to reduce the amount of plastic in the fish’s food.
“Fishmeal is an expensive and not very sustainable ingredient in fish food,” Villet said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to take fish out of the ocean and grind them up just to feed fish on a farm. If we can reduce the amount of fishmeal in the feed, there will be less plastic entering the farmed fish.”
While wild-caught fish sounds appealing, Deng said that farmed fish has the potential to be better for the consumer as the farmer has more control.
This study resonates with the larger issue of pollution and safe food options.
“It’s sad to say, but this will not be the last time that we hear about microplastics in fish, as it is becoming an increasing problem with our food,” Villet said. “But I do feel optimistic that we can figure out ways to resolve this issue.”
“It takes everybody, whether they’re scientists or everyday people to make wise decisions about how to consume food,” Villet said.
OFF THE COAST OF SANTA BARBARA — Just yards from the Fish 1, a 22-foot research vessel, a humpback whale about twice the size of the boat hurled itself out of the water, sending shimmering droplets in a broken necklace of splash.
In the other direction, a hulking cargo ship, stacked high with containers, crept closer.
About this series
Climate Visionaries highlights brilliant people around the world who are working to find climate solutions.
<p text="Aboard the Fish 1, a slight figure whose face is crinkled from years in the sun and saltwater, looked from one to the other. Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley wanted to see whether the near real-time detection system he and his colleagues had developed, Whale Safe, could avert collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>Aboard the Fish 1, a slight figure whose face is crinkled from years in the sun and saltwater, looked from one to the other. Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley wanted to see whether the near real-time detection system he and his colleagues had developed, Whale Safe, could avert collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel.<p text="The tool represents one of the ways McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, is working to protect the ocean even as it becomes more industrialized. By collecting data from several sources— an acoustic monitoring buoy that listens for whale songs, identifies them according to species with an algorithm and sends that information to satellites; a predictive habitat model for blue whales; and sightings logged in an app — Whale Safe forecasts to ships the chances of meeting a whale. Then, it grades shipping companies on whether they actually slow down to 10 knots or less during whale migrations, from May 1 to Dec. 15.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>The tool represents one of the ways McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, is working to protect the ocean even as it becomes more industrialized. By collecting data from several sources— an acoustic monitoring buoy that listens for whale songs, identifies them according to species with an algorithm and sends that information to satellites; a predictive habitat model for blue whales; and sightings logged in an app — Whale Safe forecasts to ships the chances of meeting a whale. Then, it grades shipping companies on whether they actually slow down to 10 knots or less during whale migrations, from May 1 to Dec. 15.
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“We can literally watch all of the ships in California and across the whole ocean; we are better positioned than ever before to try to track damage as it occurs, or before it occurs,” McCauley said a few days later in a Zoom call from the French Polynesian island of Moorea, where he is spending a month researching coral reefs. “We are in trouble if we don’t do something different, and I realized that if I kept sticking my head literally underwater or stayed in the lab, these problems weren’t going to fix themselves.”
<p text="Humans have worked in the seas for centuries: fishing, seafaring and more recently, drilling for oil and gas and the development of offshore wind farms. Shipping lanes cross almost every surface of the sea, except for shrinking swaths of the Southern and Arctic Ocean.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>Humans have worked in the seas for centuries: fishing, seafaring and more recently, drilling for oil and gas and the development of offshore wind farms. Shipping lanes cross almost every surface of the sea, except for shrinking swaths of the Southern and Arctic Ocean.
But as development has intensified and the planet has warmed, the 43-year-old McCauley has ventured into the gray area between scientific research and advocacy to try to fix these problems — or at least make them visible.
A cargo ship is seen in the distance near the Channel Islands on Sept. 30.
“One of Doug’s compelling traits as a scientist is that he is keen to explore outside the box,” said Benjamin Halpern, a UCSB professor of marine biology and ocean conservation who has worked with McCauley for about a decade. “He is a very creative thinker, and able to think differently about the solutions to problems and what kinds of research and science can help inform those.”
In meetings with corporate executives and political leaders, McCauley has made a consistent argument: Protecting the sea is in our interest, since it already does a lot of the work for us.
<p text="In 2020 McCauley led a report that provided a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, finding that such refuges could be powerful tools for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. Even port and fishing communities, he argued, depend on an ocean that is still wild and alive.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>In 2020 McCauley led a report that provided a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, finding that such refuges could be powerful tools for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. Even port and fishing communities, he argued, depend on an ocean that is still wild and alive.
“We have a globally unique chance to talk about this before it’s too late,” he said.
California sea lions swim near the Channel Islands in California on Sept. 30. Humpback whales swim near the Channel Islands. Ship strikes killed 80 whales annually in three of the past four years, but the toll is probably much higher than reported. Dolphins swim near the Channel Islands in California.
California sea lions swim near the Channel Islands in California on Sept. 30. Humpback whales swim near the Channel Islands. Ship strikes killed 80 whales annually in three of the past four years, but the toll is probably much higher than reported.
Dolphins swim near the Channel Islands in California.
The encounter in late September, amid one of the world’s busiest shipping channels and a vibrant ecosystem, offered a glimpse of how to do just that. Minutes after the container ship had passed McCauley’s boat, the whale — possibly the same one, but it is hard to tell — had found another, and the two sent up exhales of spray.
It was as if a bulldozer operator had plowed through a herd of elephants without stopping, not too far from a major city’s downtown, hoping to avoid a crash. And it happens many times a day here in the Santa Barbara Channel, even though barely anyone sees it.
While McCauley tracks these interactions, much of the public seems to have noticed this industrial shift underwater.
Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, and his colleagues created Whale Safe.
The landscape was less crowded when McCauley grew up in Lomita, Calif., and went to school in San Pedro, not far from the ports and the channel. He could see whale migrations out the window of his high school geometry class. From an early age, he would ride his bike to the beach as an escape, and “all of a sudden, I was in a super wild place.”
He spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood working at the local public aquarium, and working on fishing boats.
It was there, catching squid at 1 a.m. to sell as bait, hauling in a croaker bigger than he was, and watching people spend $20 a day to go out a boat to catch dinner for their families, that he saw how a thriving ocean economy works.
<p text="It was later, in his career as a scientist, that he had data to explain what he learned through experience: What is good for the ocean is also good for people, and possibly business too. Slowing down ships means fewer ship strikes, which means more whales. That is good for biodiversity and climate change: Whales themselves are carbon sinks and fertilize plant growth (another carbon sink). It also means cleaner air for those who live nearby, and fewer carbon emissions from fossil fuels.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>It was later, in his career as a scientist, that he had data to explain what he learned through experience: What is good for the ocean is also good for people, and possibly business too. Slowing down ships means fewer ship strikes, which means more whales. That is good for biodiversity and climate change: Whales themselves are carbon sinks and fertilize plant growth (another carbon sink). It also means cleaner air for those who live nearby, and fewer carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
McCauley and Callie Leiphardt, lead project scientist on Whale Safe at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, search for whales off Santa Barbara and in California’s Channel Islands.Christoph Pierre, director of Marine Operations and Collector Naturalist, checks an app where users can log whale sightings.As McCauley and Christoph Pierre, director of marine operations, search for whales, they take photos that are later uploaded to a photo ID database.
McCauley and Callie Leiphardt, lead project scientist on Whale Safe at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, search for whales off Santa Barbara and in California’s Channel Islands. Christoph Pierre, director of Marine Operations and Collector Naturalist, checks an app where users can log whale sightings. As McCauley and Christoph Pierre, director of marine operations, search for whales, they take photos that are later uploaded to a photo ID database.
He and others developed WhaleSafe, he said, after shipping companies asked: “These are the biggest mammals on the planet. Can’t you tell us when they’re there so we don’t run into them?”
Three shipping companies contacted for this article, as well as an industry association, said that they supported such programs. CMA CGM, among the world’s largest shipping container companies, is sending alerts above medium directly to their captains, and Hyundai Heavy Industries is working with Whale Safe to incorporate its data directly onboard new ships.
But some of the firms tracked by the tool, which has recently expanded its use to include San Francisco, have received F grades. Matson Navigation, for example, only slowed down roughly 18 percent of the time.
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Lee Kindberg, the head of environment and sustainability for Maersk, which received a B for slowing down in about 79 percent of cases, said the company supports Whale Safe. But she added that shippers must balance safety and speed restrictions against weather and demands from companies — and their customers — who want everything faster.
And, as climate change scrambles whales’ migration patterns and schedules, tools like Whale Safe may become even more essential in protecting them, McCauley said.
Trying to prevent ship strikes, one of the leading causes of whale deaths, is becoming an emergency. Three of the past four years rank as the deadliest on record for whales on the West Coast — about 80 annually — but the death toll is probably much higher, since most sink to the ocean floor. There have been no known ship strikes in the Santa Barbara Channel since the launch of Whale Safe in 2020, though it is too early to make a causal link.
A moored acoustic monitoring buoy near the Channel Islands in California. Santa Cruz Island is in the distance.
While aboard the Fish 1, McCauley pulled on a wet suit, flippers and a mask and jumped into the water to inspect the buoy. Looking not unlike one of the sea lions who popped up nearby with his slick outer layer and whiskers poking out beneath his mask, he scrubbed it for barnacles, and made sure all of the hardware was in good condition.
<p text="Like the buoys, McCauley seems to be able to take in information, translate it into languages its recipients understand and make it actionable, according to Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist who has worked with McCauley and now serves as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>Like the buoys, McCauley seems to be able to take in information, translate it into languages its recipients understand and make it actionable, according to Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist who has worked with McCauley and now serves as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“He is adept at boiling something down to the most important components and expressing his knowledge in an accessible fashion, and he is passionate about solutions,” she said in an email.
Still, some worry that engaging with industry could allow companies to burnish their image.
“Doug does seem quite nimble and effective at engaging with the private sector, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” Halpern said. “Maybe it’s valuable that someone is testing those waters, because we can’t solve the climate change catastrophe we face without engaging the private sector and corporations.”
<p text="McCauley spreads his message with a billionaire’s help. Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne decided to fund an ocean science lab after reading a landmark study he co-authored on the ocean’s industrialization. McCauley serves as the lab’s director, and the university has received $88 million from the Benioffs since 2016.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>McCauley spreads his message with a billionaire’s help. Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne decided to fund an ocean science lab after reading a landmark study he co-authored on the ocean’s industrialization. McCauley serves as the lab’s director, and the university has received $88 million from the Benioffs since 2016.
Since then, their conversations about the ocean and “carbon math” have shaped much of Benioff’s climate and environmental philanthropy, including the “Trillion Trees” tree-planting initiative. “By aligning with Doug on the ocean, we found a bigger vision on the climate,” Benioff said in a Zoom interview.
McCauley said he is aware that some might question engaging with private philanthropists and industry, but argued that he and others could not afford to wait for federal funding — and action. “We don’t have the luxury of time.”
The boat approaches the buoy.McCauley prepares to check and clean the buoy.McCauley steadies himself as he works on the buoy.
The boat approaches the buoy. McCauley prepares to check and clean the buoy. McCauley steadies himself as he works on the buoy.
Over the past few years, McCauley has tried to make that decision-enabling data available and legible to policymakers across the globe.
Alongside a group of other scientists, McCauley has worked in Kiribati to document how damage to coral reefs from climate change and overfishing harms the diet and health of country’s inhabitants, who depend on fish for essential nutrients. The researchers share that data with government officials to show which islands are most at risk.
<p text="McCauley is also tackling the issue of deep seabed mining, which could begin in international waters as soon as next year. McCauley and the Benioff Ocean Science Lab have tried to map potential excavation sites across the globe, since the public remains largely unaware of this development, its scope and its possible threats.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>McCauley is also tackling the issue of deep seabed mining, which could begin in international waters as soon as next year. McCauley and the Benioff Ocean Science Lab have tried to map potential excavation sites across the globe, since the public remains largely unaware of this development, its scope and its possible threats.
At the bottom of the ocean around the world lie significant deposits of metals, including some needed for electric vehicle batteries and other clean energy projects. Some companies see ocean deposits as key to this clean energy transition, and are jockeying for primacy in this prospective new industry.
<p text="Along with more than 400 other scientists, McCauley signed a statement last year arguing that deep-sea mining will result in “loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that would be irreversible on multigenerational time scales.” They argued that there are still too many unknowns in the deep ocean to mine them responsibly.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>Along with more than 400 other scientists, McCauley signed a statement last year arguing that deep-sea mining will result in “loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that would be irreversible on multigenerational time scales.” They argued that there are still too many unknowns in the deep ocean to mine them responsibly.<p text="McCauley helped bring together leaders from environmental nonprofits and businesses to discuss the risks of seabed mining. Afterward, other advocates successfully worked to pressure Google, BMW, Volvo, Samsung and others to support a moratorium.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css mw-md pb-md font–article-body font-copy ma-auto pl-sm pr-sm”>McCauley helped bring together leaders from environmental nonprofits and businesses to discuss the risks of seabed mining. Afterward, other advocates successfully worked to pressure Google, BMW, Volvo, Samsung and others to support a moratorium.
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But industry officials such as the Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron counter that deep-sea mining opponents are ignoring the trade-offs that come from keeping the ocean off limits.
“While saying ‘No’ to something is easy,” said Barron, who heads a seabed mining corporation, “finding a solution is hard and if we fail to consider all our options, we will consign our biodiverse rainforests and carbon sinks to further destruction, increase our emissions load, and further damage the oceans Douglas has set out to protect.”
McCauley, by contrast, sees these planetary puzzle pieces as interlocked. Stopping seabed mining might mean less ocean noise, which might mean more whales, which means more stored carbon, which might mean fewer forest fires in his native California, or less sea-level rise in Kiribati.
A cargo ship near the Channel Islands.
Sometimes it is impossible for McCauley to ignore how climate change has changed his surroundings. He recently took a group of students to the woods near Santa Barbara to learn about the carbon cycle, but had difficulty teaching the lesson because almost all of the trees around them had died of drought, beetle infestation, or forest fire.
“I have too real a sense of how bad things are going to get with climate in such a short amount of time,” he said.
Still, he manages to marvel at the natural world, and the mysteries it holds.
Back aboard the Fish 1, not long after the container ship — and an oil tanker — had passed by, one of the whales came right underneath the boat. It surfaced briefly about 10 feet away, flicking its tail and disappearing.
Later, over Zoom, McCauley reflected on that moment: “I have no good explanation for why a whale would swim under the boat and look up at us, other than that it can.
“Some piece of that is a reminder that they deserve a space on the planet because they are incredibly intelligent, incredibly complex and sophisticated animals, and wonder about us as much as we wonder about them.”
Megan Gray was eight years old when she got her first period. She was playing hide-and-seek with her older sister and a friend at their friend’s house in suburban Sacramento. She was wearing pink jeans, which she had saved up for a long time to buy. She tied a sweatshirt around her waist to hide the bloodstain, and, later, threw the ruined pink jeans away; when her mother asked where they’d gone, she threw a tantrum to deflect the question. Gray had a close relationship with her mom, but she was so young that they’d had no conversations about puberty; her older sister had not yet gotten her period. “There was nothing, no context for understanding,” Gray told me. “I knew what a period was—I didn’t think I was dying or anything. But still, I didn’t tell anyone for months. I just used wadded-up toilet paper. It felt so awkward and shameful.” She did eventually talk with her mom about it. But this was the nineteen-eighties. “It wasn’t some big informational session. It was very Gen X—you just dealt with things by yourself and got on with it.”
Gray was taller than her peers and wore layers of tops to conceal her developing breasts. She estimates that she was a C-cup by fifth grade. “There were assumptions about me because I had boobs. And I had never even kissed anyone. I was lucky, because nothing traumatic occurred. Yet I do think that there is a trauma in being sexualized.”
Maritza Gualy got her first period when she was eight going on nine, at the end of the eighties. Her mom showed her how to use a thick Kotex pad. Eventually, her older sister introduced her to o.b. tampons—the ones with no applicator; they were small and easier to hide. The sisters, whose parents were Colombian immigrants, attended a majority-white Catholic school in Nashville. Her school uniform had no pockets, so whenever Gualy had her period, she had to hide tampons in her bra or in the waistband of her skirt. One day, an o.b. fell out of her skirt when she and her classmates were sitting on the rug together. Later, when they were back at their desks for a spelling test, Gualy recalled, “the teacher went around from kid to kid with the tampon. ‘Is this yours?’ ‘Is this yours?’ Except she was only asking the more well-developed girls! I knew I wasn’t going to admit to it.”
In fifth grade, Gualy’s best friend got her period, and she was upset to learn that Gualy had started hers more than a year earlier and hadn’t mentioned anything. “But I already felt so othered,” Gualy said, “and I didn’t want to add to that.”
When Gray and Gualy were kids, pediatricians thought that the average age of onset of puberty in girls—defined in most medical literature as thelarche, when breast tissue begins to develop—was about eleven years old. Menarche, or first period, was thought to happen around age thirteen. Only a small percentage of girls had started puberty by the age of eight, much less started menstruating. But, by the two-thousands, new research had found that eighteen per cent of white girls, thirty-one per cent of Hispanic girls, and forty-three per cent of Black girls had entered thelarche by age eight, according to a study published in 2010. Often, these girls were taller than most of their peers and showed other signs of accelerated physical maturation, such as pubic hair and underarm odor. Thelarche typically presages the onset of menstruation by two to three years, meaning that some of these girls would have to deal with the mess and discomfort of a monthly period before they’d finished elementary school. Researchers and physicians hypothesized about possible causes for the increase in early puberty, such as increasing rates of obesity; greater exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in food, plastics, and personal-care products; and stressful or abusive home environments.
Then, during the coronavirus pandemic, pediatric endocrinologists saw a new surge of referrals for girls with early puberty. Recent retrospective studies from Germany and Turkey show that the number of these referrals doubled or even tripled during the lockdown periods of 2020 (this at a time when many families may have been avoiding non-emergency doctor’s visits for fear of COVID-19). A paper published in August in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics, which analyzed data from South Korea’s national statistics portal, found that the number of children diagnosed with precocious puberty almost doubled between 2016 and 2021, with a sharp post-2020 spike. The rise in early puberty “is a phenomenon that is occurring all over the world,” Frank M. Biro, the former director of the adolescent-medicine division at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told me. (Although there has also been a rise among boys, girls experiencing early puberty still vastly outnumber them.)
The new data may offer some safety in numbers to early-developing girls—if Gray and Gualy were growing up today, they might have found a friend or two on the same accelerated track. But early puberty is associated with a daunting list of adverse physical and psychological outcomes: various studies have suggested that early-maturing girls are at greater risk for developing obesity, breast cancer, eating disorders, depression, and a range of behavioral issues. Especially in the midst of what is increasingly understood to be a post-COVID youth mental-health crisis, the startling new uptick in early puberty is troubling to some physicians and parents. But, because the spike appears to have been triggered within a compressed, well-defined timeframe, it also offers rich terrain for better understanding the condition’s causes and effects. It also provides a chance to rethink puberty: to see it not as a gateway into adulthood but as another stage of childhood—one that is highly variable from kid to kid and need not be cause for alarm.
“We are in a great natural experiment at the moment, and we might not know the results of it for another ten years or more,” Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco, said. “I do wonder if this is going to be a cohort of kids whose puberty was more rapid because they were in a critical window of susceptibility during a time of great social upheaval.”
For generations, pediatricians have referred to a table of pubertal development known as Tanner stages, named for the pediatric endocrinologist James Tanner, one of the lead investigators of the landmark Harpenden Growth Study, conducted from 1949 to 1971 at a charity home for orphaned and neglected children in a suburb of London. There, hundreds of boys and girls were photographed naked at three-month intervals. Although the data for the Tanner scale were gathered from kids of a narrow demographic—white, thin, and bearing the internal scars of trauma or adversity in their formative years—it established, in a pair of papers published in 1969, our modern benchmarks of puberty: five distinct stages, ranging from prepubertal to fully developed. On average, the girls in the study began showing breast buds—the “Tanner II” stage—at age eleven or so, and began menstruating between thirteen and fourteen.
Early puberty is identified through physical examination, blood tests to measure levels of sex hormones, and a bone X-ray to estimate “bone age”—how close a child’s skeletal system is to reaching maturation. Puberty typically begins in girls when the pituitary gland starts secreting hormones known as gonadotropins; these hormones cause the ovaries to grow and to produce estrogen, the sex hormone that triggers the development of secondary sex characteristics. These changes usually happen alongside a distinct process called adrenarche, or the awakening of the adrenal gland, which provokes the development of pubic and underarm hair and underarm odor. In formulating his scale, Tanner was careful to present puberty as a spectrum, not a strict schedule; he emphasized that a healthy girl might start her period at age ten or age sixteen, and that every child’s progress through puberty had its own rhythms and tempo. Some of the numbers in the Harpenden Growth Study have held up remarkably well: the average age for a first period, for example, has only dropped to about twelve and a half.
But other norms set down by the Tanner stages began to come into question as early as the late nineteen-eighties, when a physician’s associate named Marcia Herman-Giddens, who worked in a pediatric clinic at the Duke University Medical Center, observed girls as young as six or seven presenting with breast buds or pubic hair. Herman-Giddens went on to lead a study of pubertal development in some seventeen thousand girls in the U.S., published in the journal Pediatrics in 1997. It found that the average age for Black girls to develop breast buds was just short of nine years old; for white girls, it was closer to ten on the dot. A moderately more rigorous longitudinal study, conducted in three U.S. cities and also published in Pediatrics, in 2010, showed those averages dropping even further, if only by a few more months.
When researchers investigated possible reasons that more girls were entering puberty sooner, they focussed on three main factors. One was stress—they hypothesized that higher cortisol levels might contribute to the premature activation of the pituitary and adrenal glands. (Some of Herman-Giddens’s work was with early-maturing girls who were believed to have been physically and sexually abused, which prompted a causality question that has never been definitively resolved: whether abuse triggers premature puberty, or whether girls who enter puberty earlier are at greater risk for abuse.) A second factor was exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which can scramble or mimic the body’s naturally occurring hormones. E.D.C.s include parabens (preservatives that are used in cosmetics, food, and pharmaceuticals), phthalates (which are added to plastics to enhance their durability and flexibility), and the dreaded bisphenol A, or BPA, a chemical compound that the Food and Drug Administration banned for use in baby bottles and sippy cups in 2012.
But determining the role of E.D.C.s in a given health condition is a conundrum for any scientist attempting to design a controlled study, because “we live in an ocean of chemicals,” Biro, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told me. “How you can measure exposure in an individual is a major issue. Some of these substances are in and out of the body in seventy-two hours, some take three or four years. Different people metabolize them at different rates.”
Speculation about the main causes of early puberty eventually coalesced around a third factor, one that was easier to isolate: body-mass index. Average B.M.I. and obesity rates in girls had risen somewhat in tandem with rates of early puberty. Some research suggested as well that both elevated cortisol levels and high exposure to E.D.C.s are associated with higher B.M.I. Meanwhile, structural racism and failures of environmental justice have ensured that Black and brown girls are more vulnerable to all three of these factors than are white or Asian girls, who tend to enter puberty later.
The correlation between B.M.I. and early puberty has to do with a hormone called leptin, which is one of the necessary components for the pituitary gland to begin producing gonadotropins. Leptin is produced in the fat tissue and plays a role in raising the body’s estrogen levels. Typically, as estrogen increases, so does fat and leptin, which can create a feedback loop—weight gain spurs puberty, and puberty spurs weight gain. (This relationship also helps to explain why some very thin girls and women don’t menstruate: they don’t have enough fat tissue to make leptin.)
“Leptin is not so much the trigger for puberty as it’s permissive,” Paul Kaplowitz, a professor emeritus of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told me. “An adequate level of fat tissue is a requirement for puberty to progress. But we don’t know for sure if fat is the only reason why girls in the twenty-first century are maturing earlier than girls in the latter part of the twentieth century. Obesity is a big part of the story. It’s not the whole story.”
Given everything we understand about the mechanisms of puberty, it feels intuitive and logical that some percentage of lockdown kids, who might have otherwise followed a more Tanner-like progression in their physical development, may have tipped into early puberty thanks to a conspiracy of increased calorie intake, more fatty and processed foods, and decreased exercise, as well as the manifold sources of stress and anxiety that the pandemic generated during a pivotal stage of their development. Like early puberty itself, mental-health problems among children and teen-agers were on the rise before the pandemic, and skyrocketed during and after it. Between 2009 and 2019, according to data from the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, rates of depression and suicidal ideation among high-school students all rose significantly. Approximately one in three kids in this age group reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness”; in a C.D.C. study of high-school students conducted in 2021, this number had risen to forty-four per cent. Mental-health-related emergency-room visits for children ages five to eleven increased by twenty-four per cent from March to October, 2020, as compared with the same period in 2019; for kids ages twelve to seventeen, the figure was thirty-one per cent. Child psychologists are overwhelmed with new-patient requests, and many have stopped taking insurance. The National Association of School Psychologists has stated that there is roughly one school psychologist for every twelve hundred students in the U.S.
A crucial, perhaps overlooked link between early puberty and the youth mental-health crisis is sleep. Marlon Goering, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, studies the relationship between pubertal timing and behavioral challenges in young people. He told me that melatonin, the sleep-regulating hormone that the brain produces in response to darkness, may have contributed to the pandemic-era jump in early puberty. During the lockdowns, many children got less sleep and more irregular sleep, and they spent vastly more time in front of the blue light of screens, which inhibited their ability to secrete melatonin. A drop in melatonin can contribute to symptoms of anxiety and depression; it also activates an increase in a protein called kisspeptin, which is another of the trigger hormones for puberty. The melatonin-disrupting effects of blue light may have persisted long past the acute phase of the pandemic: many schools and students have continued using the iPads and Chromebooks that they acquired to facilitate remote learning, and many households never reset the screen-time rules that they had in place before lockdown obliterated them.
Some pediatric endocrinologists suspect that the recent spike in early puberty may be subtly different from the decades-long rise that preceded it. Greenspan, of Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco, and other colleagues have noticed that, among their consultations for early puberty, they are not seeing as many girls with higher B.M.I. as they did pre-pandemic. She also said that pubertal tempo—the total time it takes to progress from thelarche to menarche—is speeding up among her patients, regardless of B.M.I. If large-scale data eventually bear out Greenspan’s observations, it would likely mean that the average age of first period, which has remained relatively stable over the last eighty years, may begin to drop more noticeably, even if only for a micro-generation of kids.
Much of the time, early puberty does not require medical intervention (although, in rare cases, it may be caused by a brain tumor or by a disorder of the patient’s ability to produce cortisol). “I can’t tell you how many kids come into my practice who have their periods early, and when the parents don’t make a deal out of it, the kids tend to be fine—‘Yeah, it’s kind of annoying, but Mommy showed me how to change the pad.’ And you’re talking to a third grader,” Greenspan said.
“We’re cognizant of trying not to medicalize things that are a normal part of life,” Deanna Adkins, a pediatric endocrinologist and the director of the Duke Child and Adolescent Gender Care Clinic, said. “Early puberty is early, but it’s still normal in most cases. We do the best we can to not make a child feel like, ‘My parents are bringing me to the doctor because there’s something wrong with me.’ ”
Recently, a parent whom I will call R.—she asked that I not use her name, to protect her daughter’s privacy—phoned her pediatrician’s office because her seven-year-old had developed a breast bud. R., who is a college professor and lives in Brooklyn, spoke first with a nurse. “She said, ‘You’re the third or fourth mom this week who’s called about this. Puberty is starting earlier and earlier. It’s very normal, Mom.’ When we saw the pediatrician, it was the same thing: ‘Oh, Mom, it’s normal.’ ”
R. found the pediatrician’s response dismissive without being reassuring. “There was no wider analysis about the consequences related to her socialization at school, her relationships with boys and men—all these things that it opened up,” R. said. She was especially uneasy because her daughter has experienced unusual stressors in the last couple of years, including a concussion and her parents’ divorce. Adding the possibility of early puberty, R. said, “just feels like insult to injury—like, can we give this kid a childhood?”
I spoke with R. again after she and her daughter had a more satisfying appointment with a pediatric endocrinologist. “There was a straight-up acknowledgement, from the beginning, that this is a big deal. It was O.K. to think of this as something to be attentive to.” Now, mother and daughter await the results of blood tests and a bone X-ray; it’s safe to say that, of the two, R. is the more anxious. When they first broached the topic of early puberty, her daughter was excited. “Yes! Now I can get a bra!” she exclaimed. Puberty in a younger girl could be a simpler rite of passage, at times even a thrilling one, R. said, “if there wasn’t society out there to worry about.”
Even in the absence of an acute medical crisis, some families do decide to halt the process of puberty temporarily, with medication that blocks the release of sex hormones—most commonly, a drug called Lupron. Lupron is sometimes prescribed off-label to children with gender dysphoria, and, due to efforts in many states to limit or ban gender-affirming pediatric care, the drug has become controversial. A puberty blocker such as Lupron may inhibit bone mineralization, when calcium and phosphate act on collagen to increase bone mass; this process accelerates during adolescence. Anecdotal reports have proliferated for years about women who took Lupron for precocious puberty in childhood and went on to suffer osteoporosis, joint disorders, and chronic pain in adulthood, but most research on puberty blockers and bone health is reassuring. In any case, it is difficult to adjudicate concerns about any long-term effects when those concerns are weaponized by, say, the Arkansas state legislature, which is attempting to prohibit gender-affirming pediatric care in the state with a bill known as the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, or the state attorney general’s office in Texas, which has proposed that administering puberty blockers to children with gender dysphoria may constitute “child abuse.” (Studies have repeatedly shown that mental-health outcomes for L.G.B.T.Q. youth were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, and advocates for trans young people have warned that the ongoing proliferation of anti-trans legislation will compound those effects.)
Adkins told me that she has not seen long-term issues such as low bone density or higher rates of fractures in patients who took Lupron. “When kids are in early puberty, they’re already starting to add calcium to their bones,” she said. “Pausing that for a period of time slows down their growth spurt and slows down their calcium spurt. But once you stop the medication, all of that restarts.” Children with precocious puberty typically stay on blockers until they reach a bone age of around eleven or twelve. “They’ll be accruing calcium in their bones from the restart of puberty all the way to the age of thirty or so,” Adkins said. “There’s plenty of time to catch up.”
There are two main criteria to consider when deciding to start a child on Lupron, Adkins told me. One is if the child’s projected adult height falls below the fifth-percentile range, due to rapid bone maturation; stalling puberty buys the kid more time to add some inches. The other is more subjective, and has to do with physical or developmental challenges that the child might face in addition to precocious puberty.
V., who is an occupational therapist in Orlando, has a daughter who is on the autism spectrum. She noticed that her daughter’s body began rapidly transforming in the late spring of 2020, when she was six and a half: breast buds, a huge growth spurt. By age eight, she had pubic hair and wore clothes in an adult-size extra-small. She frequently felt “off” in ways that she couldn’t precisely articulate—fatigued and headache-y. Her social status was changing, too. “She told me that boys were giving her more attention at school,” V. said. “She was like, ‘You’ve never noticed me before. Now, all of a sudden, I’m interesting? What?’ ”
V. brought her daughter to a developmental pediatrician and a pediatric endocrinologist; the latter was a four-month wait. An X-ray showed that her “bone age” outpaced her chronological age by about two years. Her doctor guessed that she might begin her period within a few months, which seemed too soon for her. In the spring, her daughter began taking Vitamin D supplements, which aid in calcium absorption. She received her first dose of Lupron in August, two months before her ninth birthday. “I felt as if she needed more time to work on her social-emotional skills before she had to deal with a period every month,” V. said. “I want her to feel like, ‘O.K., I’m ready for this.’ But honestly, I need some time to adjust, too.”
In Judy Blume’s 1970 young-adult novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” which has served as a puberty handbook of sorts for generations of girls, a character named Laura Danker looms awkwardly on the periphery. Laura is studious, very shy, and very tall. When the eleven-year-old narrator of the book, Margaret Simon, sees Laura on the first day of school, she mistakes her for a teacher, not a fellow sixth grader. “You could see the outline of her bra through her blouse and you could also tell from the front that it wasn’t the smallest size,” Margaret observes. “She sat down alone and didn’t talk to anyone.” Margaret has just moved to town and easily makes new friends, who giggle and gossip about “the big blonde with the big you know whats.” “She’s got a bad reputation,” one girl says. “She’s been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I bet she gets her period,” another alleges.
Laura’s body commands a chaotic attention from her peers: by turns affronted and leering, repelled and keenly envious. Her body provokes their imagination, then serves to corroborate whatever they might imagine. Laura belongs nowhere: a head taller than all the boys, arms crossed over her chest, feeling the shame and confusion of the eleven-year-old she is but does not look like.
In Blume, the fast-developing girl is sympathetic but mostly a cipher, a narrative device; in Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend,” she gets to tell the story. In the book—the first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels—young Lenù, the narrator, gets her period without knowing what it is; she is comforted by an older friend, who’s had hers for a year already. Lenù’s best friend, Lila, shows no signs of development; for this, Lenù seems to pity her. “Suddenly, she seemed small, smaller than I had ever seen her…she didn’t know what the blood was. And no boy had ever made a declaration to her.” For an instant, it doesn’t entirely make sense that they are peers, much less friends.
Lenù is wrung out by a classical pubertal funk: moodiness, anxiety, impulsivity (she flashes her breasts at some classmates for ten lire). Like Laura in “Are You There God?,” Lenù feels herself to be at once conspicuous and isolated. “I felt at the mercy of obscure forces acting inside my body,” she says. She is “besieged by boys.” She searches for respite. “I sneaked away, I compressed my bosom by holding my arms crossed over it, I felt mysteriously guilty and alone with my guilt.”
The stigma of early development in girls is particularly painful because, in some cases, it may perpetuate a vicious cycle. An article published in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, in May, found that early puberty put girls at higher risk for obesity, type-2 diabetes, breast cancer, and heart disease along with “depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and antisocial behaviors,” “earlier onset of sexual activity, higher number of sexual partners, and higher likelihood of substance use, delinquency, and low academic achievement.” The journal Hormones and Behavior, in 2013, argued that “early maturing girls are at unique risk for psychopathology.” A Pediatricsarticle titled “Early Puberty, Negative Peer Influence, and Problem Behaviors in Adolescent Girls,” from 2013, stated, “Early timing of puberty and affiliation with deviant friends are associated with higher levels of delinquent and aggressive behavior. Early-maturing adolescents tend to affiliate with more-deviant peers and appear more susceptible to negative peer influences.” (Free book-title idea for Elena Ferrante: “My Deviant Friend.”)
Kaplowitz, of Children’s National Hospital, and Greenspan both advised caution about the most doomsaying studies of girls who experience early puberty. Some of the results are derived from brief questionnaires. Others are based on self-reported data, which can render wobblier conclusions (for example, most women can pinpoint when their period began, more or less, but not as many know precisely when their breasts began to bud). “Many of these studies are not well controlled, and many of them don’t have a large number of subjects,” Kaplowitz said. “I don’t think these are settled issues.”
Because more Black girls enter puberty at a younger age, and because Black girls tend to come under more punitive surveillance no matter what Tanner stage they happen to occupy, the onus of early puberty can be especially harmful to them. A 2017 report from the Georgetown Law School’s Center on Poverty and Inequality studied the impact of “adultification,” a phenomenon in which children are socialized to act older than they are, and in which Black kids, specifically, are perceived as “less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers”—less in need, or less deserving, of the kinds of protections that childhood confers. Adultification has effects across the education and juvenile-justice systems: Black girls are more likely to be disciplined than white girls of the same age for the same infractions, and they have higher rates of school suspensions, referrals to law enforcement, and arrests.
The emotional and behavioral haywire of adolescence is driven by a pair of interlocking mechanisms: the hormonal and the social. The hormones that are released in puberty can lead to increased risk-taking and sensation-seeking; a nine-year-old who is newly doused in these hormones may not have the same self-regulating ability to manage them that a thirteen-year-old does. And just how much self-regulation an early-developing girl must exhibit depends on her surroundings: not just the scrutiny she receives from adults, which in turn is mediated by race and class, but by the tendencies of the children and young adults with whom she interacts. An older-looking girl might be more likely to hang out with actually older girls, and do the things they do.
Among the adverse outcomes linked to early puberty that are most strongly supported by data, causation is not always clear. “We know that people who have menarche earlier do tend to have a higher rate of depression,” Greenspan said. “But we don’t know if that’s a biological thing or a social thing. Is it the biological effects of estrogen on the developing brain? Or is it the stress of looking older than your peers, and having to deal with that?” Even the ways in which a girl looks older than her peers is heavily dependent on her social context. “Are you in a school with uniforms, where everybody looks kind of shapeless? Or are you in an environment where clothes are tighter, and everyone is looking at you? You might feel uncomfortable or even miserable in your body—and that could lead to depression, that could lead to body dysmorphia,” Greenspan said.
Several pediatric endocrinologists told me that parents are often highly agitated by the likelihood that their children are becoming sexual beings and that others are going to sexualize them. But, Greenspan said, “puberty and sexuality can be separated. A seven- or eight-year-old girl going through puberty isn’t necessarily going to associate that with pregnancy and sex unless someone makes that association for her.” In Greenspan’s view, families can choose to see puberty not as a Rubicon but as one among many points on a decades-long continuum of transformation. “Kids’ bodies are constantly changing. They need new shoes because their feet are bigger; they can’t fit into their clothes because they’re getting taller; they’re banging into furniture because they no longer know where their body is in space.” In these prepubertal developmental stages—when kids are sprouting and molting and falling over and spilling their teeth on the floor—the adults, while attuned to these metamorphoses, are not especially fazed by them. The ordeal of puberty, Greenspan said, should be similarly understood: as a station of childhood, not its terminus.
More than once in my conversations with Greenspan, she said that adults “have to let kids be the age they are.” But early puberty presents something of a physics problem—how do we measure the passage of time? The bone X-ray may best illustrate the dilemma: a medical assessment that assigns the child to a skeleton that is older than the child herself. A tall, developed ten-year-old who has reached menarche may not be chronologically older than a petite, flat-chested ten-year-old who has not—but she is, in a real sense, physically and even experientially older. Adults and other children will almost inevitably relate to the girl differently—and not necessarily even in a sexualized way, although that is of grave concern; but intellectually, socially, emotionally. They may have advanced expectations of her, and she may strive to meet those expectations or fail to, and, either way, that cycle of stimulus and response is determining her place in her social milieu, conjuring a mirror in which she sees herself, and wiring her brain in configurations that subtly differ from those of her average-developing peers. Nature begets nurture. For this girl, the hands of the clock simply go faster.
Megan Gray is now forty-six, works as a writer in Los Angeles, and has two kids, ages ten and eight. She looks back on the shock of early puberty with an affecting sort of analytical melancholy. “When your hormones change when you’re that young, your body is flooded with such an intensity of emotions that you’re not nearly mature enough to deal with it,” she told me. “I mean, nobody is, ever, and that’s why junior high is the worst.” But she was only eight years old. “Everything is felt so powerfully, but your brain has not caught up with that,” she went on. “For me, that manifested in depression.” Developing early, Gray said, clouded her ability to see the romantic and sexual possibilities that her adult life promised. “When you’re shamed at a young age for a sexuality that you don’t even have, I think it inhibits you from developing a sexuality. I began to associate people seeing me in a sexual way, or even as attractive, as a negative. At the same time, when you’re entering that age, you do want people to like you. And you want to like other people. There was that constant tension of, you know, liking is good, but attraction is bad, even if, on a rational level, I understood that wasn’t true. That contradiction started very young.”
Gray and Maritza Gualy, who is now forty-one and a product designer in Los Angeles, both said that developing early had a positive influence on how they approach the subject of puberty with their own kids. “My husband and I want to talk to them preëmptively, openly, and answer their questions honestly,” Gualy said. Her children, who are nine and eight, have already had “the puberty talk,” she went on, “and they have no shame about it—yet. They have fun detecting their body changes and announcing them.” Recently, a speaker visited her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to discuss puberty; now her daughter is putting together an emergency period kit to keep in her backpack, “just in case she or one of her friends needs it while at school,” Gualy said.
Gray told me, “Our generation of parents is hopefully doing things differently. My son may never forgive me for making him do a two-hour Zoom for the Sex-Positive Families puberty workshop. But I’d rather my kids grew up to tell the story about how their mom gave them too much information than not enough.”
She also recognizes that indulging too much in parental anxieties can have a conjuring power; that awareness of the past, and of the possibilities it may show you, doesn’t have to force upon you any foreboding premonitions. “I want to avoid the mistakes that the grownups in my life made,” Gray said. “At the same time, I don’t want to put any of that baggage on my kids. I don’t want to make any assumptions about their experiences just because I had some trauma surrounding puberty. I’m trying to remain neutral, and to listen when they tell me how they feel about it.” ♦
More than 100 black-clad protesters, many of whom had flown in from across the country, marched in a traditional Louisiana funeral procession from Freedom Plaza to the White House Tuesday. They held signs with the names of loved ones lost to illness due to the industrial pollution that runs rampant in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.
Debra Ramirez walked about half a block behind the rest of the march, occasionally stopping to rest. A great-grandmother from Mossville, Louisiana, Ramirez struggles with knee problems and had a heart attack just last year.
“I’m determined to make it, I don’t care if I’m the last one,” Ramirez said to a woman marching beside her. “This might be my last march, but I’m going to make it.”
As she walked, Ramirez held an ornate black umbrella and a sign that featured a “death tree” with more than a dozen names of those who had passed on its branches. She’s been involved with the fight for environmental justice in the region since the 1980s.
Debra Ramirez raises a sign during the People vs. Fossil Fuels Campaign rally on Oct. 25, referring to the chemicals produced in her community that she believes are contaminating the water and air. (Marckell Williams/ The Washington Informer)
When she did arrive at the march’s endpoint in front of the White House, Ramirez spoke alongside other advocates to a crowd of protesters that included Louisianans, Texans and others from out of town alongside many DMV locals. The group gathered behind a fake coffin reading simply “R.I.P.”
“I was the last one to get here, but I’m going to be the last one standing,” she said over a megaphone. “All the governmental entities, all the presidents, everybody knew that we were being poisoned. They knew that our people were dying. They knew that they were killing our children.”
The protesters held huge banners demanding President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency and stop approving all fossil fuel projects. Pollution from oil and gas production, as well other industries like plastics production, disproportionately harms Black communities. Cancer Alley, a stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, includes more than 150 of these polluting facilities.
“Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards basically greenlit that plastics plant, and we know from the other plants already located in St. James Parish, that it was going to basically kill us,” Shamell Lavigne said. “We were like, ‘we have to do something. And we cannot allow this $9.4-billion plastics plant to come into our community.’”
Rise St. James has grown since then, and attracted support throughout environmental and climate justice communities. Rise St. James regularly partners with groups all along the Gulf in Louisiana and Texas impacted by industrial pollution. These areas, like Cancer Alley, have been called “sacrifice zones” because of the high levels of pollution-related illness.
“Our lives are at stake,” Lois Booker Malvo, a resident of Lake Charles, Louisiana and a two-time cancer survivor, said to the crowd. “Stop using us to make money and destroying our lives! We are sick and tired of being killed by industry.”
In spite of the exhaustion and anger, the protest found room for joy—a necessity in continuing the fight. After the speakers finished, the D.C.-based band Too Much Talent played as the crowd sang.
“Victory is mine,” they sang, led by Rise St. James’ Sharon Lavigne. “Joy is mine.”
Only 5% of plastic waste generated by US last year was recycled, report says
Americans discarded 51m tons of plastic in 2021 – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere
Only 5% of the mountains of plastic waste generated by US households last year was recycled, according to new research by Greenpeace.
Americans discarded 51m tons of wrappers, bottles and bags in 2021 – about 309lb of plastic per person – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere in tiny toxic particles.
The plastics problem is not just down to wanton consumerism or laziness – in fact the situation would still be bad even if every household separated every piece of plastic and disposed of it in a dedicated recycling plant, according to Greenpeace.
Not a single type of plastic packaging in the US meets the definition of recyclable used by either the Federal Trade Commission or the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s new plastic economy initiative, the report found.
Even plastics long considered recyclable – bottles and jugs (PET #1 and HDPE #2) –fall far short of the 30% recycling rate needed to meet the definition of recyclable by the foundation. The reprocessing rate for the rest of the plastics used by millions of people everyday to wrap leftovers, eat takeout or return unwanted online purchases is less than 5%.
The recycling sham will anger those who have spent time diligently washing out plastic containers and bottles, in the belief that they’d end up reprocessed and repurposed into another plastic package the world probably didn’t need.
“Corporations like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Unilever have worked with industry front groups to promote plastic recycling as the solution to plastic waste for decades. But the data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable. The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill,” said Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA senior plastics campaigner.
The report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, updates the 2020 survey of 370 recycling plants which found most plastics were not widely accepted, and even the bottles and jugs were not completely recycled or recyclable. Not much has changed, in fact the official recycling rate in the US has fallen from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the US, like many countries, exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.
After China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2018 because it was basically garbage, too dirty to recycle, the shortfall in capacity was never recouped while plastic use kept rising.
But exporting plastic was always a false solution, as is all plastic recycling because plastic waste is so ubiquitous that it’s extremely difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort, environmentally harmful and expensive to reprocess, and often contains toxic materials.
On the other hand, paper, cardboard, metal and glass do not have these problems, which is why they are recycled at much higher rates.
After three decades, industry claims that plastic recycling is still in its infancy ring hollow, according to Ramsden. “Instead of continuing to greenwash and mislead the American public, industry should support an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty that will finally end the age of plastic.”
The treaty is currently being drawn up, after more than 170 nations in March backed a historic UN resolution to end plastic pollution, with an international legally binding agreement to be in place by 2024. It’s hoped that the treaty will determine the trajectory of the plastic pollution crisis for generations to come, with packaging being replaced with reuse and refill systems or no packaging at all.
If the status quo continues, global plastic use and waste will nearly triple by 2060 with a meagre increase in plastic recycling, according to a recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The plastics industry says there is way to help solve the crisis of plastic waste plaguing the planet’s oceans, beaches and lands— recycle it, chemically.
Chemical recycling typically uses heat or chemical solvents to break down plastics into liquid and gas to produce an oil-like mixture or basic chemicals. Industry leaders say that mixture can be made back into plastic pellets to make new products.
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“What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade association for American chemical companies.
ExxonMobil, New Hope Energy, Nexus Circular, Eastman, Encina and other companies are planning to build large plastics recycling plants. Seven smaller facilities across the United States already recycle plastic into new plastic, according to the ACC. A handful of others convert hard-to-recycle used plastics into alternative transportation fuels for aviation, marine and auto uses.
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But environmental groups say advanced recycling is a distraction from real solutions like producing and using less plastic. They suspect the idea of recyclable plastics will enable the steep ramp up in plastic production to continue. And while the amount produced globally grows, recycling rates for plastic waste are abysmally low, especially in the United States.
Plastic packaging, multi-layered films, bags, polystyrene foam and other hard-to-recycle plastic products are piling up in landfills and in the environment, or going to incinerators.
Judith Enck, the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, says plastics recycling doesn’t work and never will. Chemical additives and colorants used to give plastic different properties mean that there are thousands of types, she said. That’s why they can’t be mixed together and recycled in the conventional, mechanical way. Nor is there much of a market for recycled plastic, because virgin plastic is cheap, she said.
So what is more likely to happen than actual recycling, said Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is the industry will shift to burning plastics as waste or as fuel.
Lee Bell, a policy advisor for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, thinks chemical recycling is a public relations exercise by the petrochemical industry. The purpose is to dissuade regulators from capping plastics production. Making plastic could become even more important to the fossil fuel industry as climate change puts pressure on their transportation fuels, Bell said.
The industry has made roughly 11 billion metric tons of plastic since 1950, with half of that produced since 2006, according to industrial ecologist Roland Geyer. Global plastic production is expected to more than quadruple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal in Norway.
The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says the share of plastic waste that is successfully recycled is projected to rise to 17% in 2060 from 9% in 2019 if no additional policies are enacted to restrain plastic demand and enhance recycling, but that wouldn’t begin to keep up with the projected growth in plastic waste. With more ambitious policies, the amount of plastic waste that is recycled could rise to 40% to 60%, according to OECD.
Two groups working to reduce plastic pollution, the Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics, estimated that the U.S. rate for recycling plastic waste in 2021 was even lower — 5% to 6%, after China stopped accepting other countries’ waste in 2018.
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The U.S. national recycling strategy says no option, including chemical recycling, should be ruled out. The way to think of these new plants, the industry says, is as manufacturing plants. They should be legally defined that way, and not as waste management. About 20 states have adopted laws in the past five years consistent with that wish. Opponents say it’s a way to skirt the more stringent environmental regulations that apply to waste management facilities.
The U.S. facilities currently recycling plastic into new plastic are small — the largest is a 60-ton-per-day plant in Akron, Ohio, Alterra Energy, according to the ACC.
Alterra Energy says it takes in the hard-to-recycle plastics, like flexible pouches, multi-layered films and rigid plastics from automobiles — everything except plastic water bottles since those are recycled mechanically, or plastics marked with a “3″ since they contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.
“Our mission is to solve plastic pollution,” said Jeremy DeBenedictis, company president. “That is not just a tag line. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution.”
The Ohio facility typically takes in 40 tons to 50 tons per day, heating and liquifying the plastic to turn it back into an oil or hydrocarbon liquid, about 10,000 gallons to 12,000 gallons daily. About 75% of what comes into the facility can be liquified like that. Another 15% is turned into a synthetic natural gas to heat the process, while the remainder — paper, metals, dyes, inks and colorants — exit the reactor as a byproduct, or carbon char, DeBenedictis said. The char is disposed of as nonhazardous waste, though in the future some hope to sell it to the asphalt industry.
The process doesn’t involve oxygen so there’s no combustion or incineration of plastics, DeBenedictis said, and their product is trucked as a synthetic oil to petrochemical companies, essentially the “building blocks on a molecular level for new plastic production.”
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The materials they take in, that haven’t been able to be recycled until now, should not be sent to landfills, dumped in the ocean or incinerated, DeBenedictis said.
“That next level has to be a new technology, what you call chemical recycling or advanced recycling. That’s the next frontier,” he said.
“Let’s not kid ourselves here. This is the right time to do it,” added company CEO Fred Schmuck. “There is absolutely no way we can meet our climate goals without addressing plastic waste.”
DeBenedictis said he’s licensing the technology to try to grow the industry because that’s the “best way to make the quickest impact to the world.” A Finnish oil and gas company, Neste, is currently working to commercialize Alterra’s technology in Europe.
The main chemical recycling technologies use pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerization. Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is skeptical. He says he has been hearing that pyrolysis is going to change everything since the 1990s, but it hasn’t happened. Instead, plastic production keeps climbing.
GAIA views chemical recycling as a false solution that will facilitate greater production of virgin plastic — a high-energy process with high-carbon emissions that releases hazardous air pollutants, Tangri said. Instead, GAIA wants plastic production to be dramatically scaled back and only recyclable plastics to be produced.
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“Nobody needs more plastic,” Tangri said. “We keep trying to solve these production problems with recycling when really we need to change how much we make and what we make. That’s where the solution lies.”
In Rhode Island, state lawmakers considered a bill this year to exempt such facilities from solid waste licensing requirements. It was vigorously opposed by environmental activists and residents near the port of Providence who feared it would lead to a new plant in their neighborhood. State environmental officials sided with them.
Monica Huertas, executive director of The People’s Port Authority, helped lead the opposition. The neighborhood is already overburdened by industry, she said, so much so that she sometimes has asthma attacks after walking around.
Dwayne Keys said it’s unfair that he and his neighbors always have to be on guard for proposals like these, unlike residents in some of the state’s wealthy, white neighborhoods. The port area has enough environmental hazards that residents don’t benefit from economically, he added. Keys calls it environmental racism.
“The assessment is, we’re the path of least resistance,” he said. “Not that there’s no resistance, but the least. We’re a coalition of individuals volunteering our time. We don’t have wealth or access to resources or the legal means, as opposed to our white counterparts in higher income, higher net worth communities.”
The chemistry council’s Baca said the facilities operate at the highest standards, the industry believes everyone deserves clear air and water, and he would invite any detractors to one of the facilities so they can see that firsthand.
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U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040, and have already announced more than $7 billion in investments in both mechanical and chemical recycling.
“I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that,” Baca said. “And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible.”
Kate O’Neill wrote the book on waste, called “Waste.” A professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, she has thought a lot about whether chemical recycling should be part of the solution to the plastic crisis. She said she has concluded yes, even though she knows saying so would “piss off the environmentalists.”
“With some of these big problems,” she said, “we can’t rule anything out.”
Fifteen years after Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry began to raise worries about air and water pollution, the industry’s critics now fear a new source of harmful emissions from the fledgling petrochemical industry, which is poised to become a major customer for the state’s abundant gas reserves.
In a state that has long nurtured the extraction of oil, coal and now gas, environmentalists warn that a vast new Shell plant on the banks of the Ohio River 30 miles north of Pittsburgh will add to air and water problems in a region that has endured decades of pollution from the steel and coal industries.
The plant, which is expected to open before the end of 2022, will convert ethane, a form of natural gas, into ethylene, a building block for plastics. The operation will produce millions of tons of tiny plastic pellets called “nurdles” which opponents predict will leak into the Ohio River and beyond during shipment, and will contribute to a flood of plastics that are polluting the world’s oceans and clogging landfills.
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After being lured to Pennsylvania with the promise of $1.6 billion in state tax credits, and being awarded a state air permit to issue more volatile organic compounds than that emitted by the Clairton Coke Works, a notorious local polluter, the “cracker” plant appears to be getting the same easy ride from state officials as the fracking industry did starting in the mid-2000s, critics say.
The Shell plant, in Monaca, will take ethane, a liquid hydrocarbon separated from fracked natural gas, and “crack” its molecules to make ethylene and polyethylene resin pellets called nurdles, which are melted down and turned into all things plastic, from bottles to car parts.
“We are seeing a lot of these things repeat themselves with the cracker, and with the specter of petrochemical development in the region,” said Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit that has been monitoring the health impacts of the region’s natural gas industry, and representing affected residents, since 2012.
Speaking at a webinar on “Fracked Plastics: Petrochemical, Policy & Public Health” on Sept. 28, Steele said the new plant has already received favorable treatment from state officials, including Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, and may enjoy the same status as the natural gas industry that supplies it when it begins operating soon.
She argued that gas-industry regulations are based not on safety but on what constitutes acceptable risk for operators and state officials. Regulations are often lax, and may not be effectively enforced by officials who focus on the industry’s creation of jobs rather than its threats to public health, she said.
“The promise of economic benefits has very often driven the conversation, and caution around health impacts have made less of an appearance or been overshadowed,” she said.
Pennsylvania’s fossil fuel industry has long been favored by the Republican-controlled state legislature. In 2012, it passed the wide-ranging Act 13, which curbed local government rights to use zoning to control gas-industry development in their towns, authorized the state to preempt local ordinances, and allowed the industry to prevent the public disclosure of fracking chemicals that were suspected of harming public health.
Although some parts of the law were later struck down by the courts, much of it remains in effect, Steele said. She argued that the state’s efforts to regulate the Shell plant appear to be following the same pattern.
She said state policy does not reflect how the oil and gas industry affects public health. “There’s a persistent gap between what’s known and what’s done with that knowledge,” she said. “If there has been a body of scientific evidence, which now there absolutely is, it has not been incorporated into a policy approach.”
Advocates like Steele say the state’s approach to the fossil fuel industry is shown by lax enforcement by the Department of Environmental Protection.
Jamar Thrasher, a spokesman for the DEP, rejected the accusation that it does not enforce regulations aimed at protecting public health. He said the department conducted some 25,000 inspections of oil and gas facilities in 2020, the latest year for which data are available, and issued more than 9,300 notices of violation. He said the department has imposed millions of dollars in penalties, including a fine of $30 million on the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer after its Revolution Pipeline, carrying natural gas, exploded in Beaver County in 2018.
“DEP disputes any notion that Pennsylvania’s environmental laws and regulations are not enforced,” Thrasher said.
The Shell plant, which reportedly cost between $6 billion and $10 billion, is expected to create about 600 permanent jobs on a 386-acre site that was once used for zinc smelting. Curtis Smith, a spokesman for Shell, said there’s no date set yet for opening, but “hopefully soon.”
The company agreed to monitor air emissions on the perimeter of its plant following settlement in 2017 of a lawsuit by the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Integrity Group, two nonprofits.
As the Shell plant prepares to open, activists in the Pittsburgh area are conducting baseline testing of air and water to show any environmental impacts when the plant begins operating.
“We’re doing a lot of investigations, and making sure that they know that we’re watching, and they can’t just operate and put anything into our waterways just because it’s easy for them,” said Heather Hulton VanTassel, executive director of Three Rivers Waterkeeper, an environmental group that monitors the health of the Ohio, Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers in the region.
VanTassel told webinar participants that activists have already found “micronurdles”— tiny pellets of plastic— in the river near the plant, and they see those as warning sign of more plastic pollution when the facility is up and running. In recent months, there have been discharges of foam into the river from the main outfall, and there was a spill of 2,500 gallons of sulfuric acid from the plant in March this year, she said.
“They are not even operational, and we’ve already seen violations of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts,” she said.
Smith, the Shell spokesman, said that the plant, yet to begin operations, was not the source of those pellets found in the river.
“We have no reason to believe the pellets in question came from Shell Polymers Monaca,” he said. “There are a number of safeguards in place to ensure that remains the case. We will always comply with regulations and report violations to the proper authorities in a timely manner. Our priority remains the health of people and the environment and will continue to seek out and apply best practices to ensure our operations have no negative impact.”
Efforts to measure the plant’s air impacts also include the installation of air monitors around the Pittsburgh region by citizen activists including Mark Dixon, an independent air-quality advocate and filmmaker who has been working on the issue since 2014.
Dixon and his supporters fix devices about the size of soda cans to private buildings. Data gathered by the sensors are transmitted in near real time to two websites – AirViz and Purple Air – that show air quality in specific locations.
The campaign, Dixon said, is designed to supplement the efforts of regulators, and Shell itself, to measure any air impacts from the new plant, and to show that there’s a network of activists who are also gathering data. Dixon said the campaign is designed to show that there are “other eyes on Shell.”
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit based at Bennington College, Vermont, said her campaign is speaking out against petrochemical producers like the Shell plant because of their ties to the plastics industry.
“The petrochemical buildout is very much linked to the problem of plastic pollution in our ocean, in our bodies,” she said in opening remarks at the webinar. “It’s a health issue, it’s an environmental justice issue.”
The ruling, by Judge Trudy White, rejected the state’s grounds for issuing the permits to emit 800 tons a year of toxic pollution into a predominantly Black, low-income community, and to produce 13.6 million tons per year of greenhouse gases, about the equivalent of 3.5 coal-fired power plants.
“I think that court decision has galvanized activism all over Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania and other states that are facing threats by petrochemical facilities,” Enck told the webinar.
Among the Shell plant’s biggest impacts, environmentalists say, will be its appetite for natural gas from fracked wells sunk into the region’s Marcellus and Utica Shale gas fields—among the most abundant gas reserves in the world.
Dr. John Stolz, a microbiologist at Duquesne University and a longtime critic of the industry, has estimated that the volume of gas needed by the Shell plant will require fracked gas from 1,000 new wells every five to 10 years.
Smith, the Shell spokesman, has said that natural gas will fuel a cogeneration plant on site, producing electricity, and that any excess power from the plant will be sold to the grid, which would potentially reduce carbon emissions from other fossil fuel use.
Jill Antares Hunkler, a seventh-generation Ohio River Valley resident, said during the webinar that she fears the new plant will hurt public health in the same way that a concentration of chemical plants have been linked to illness in Louisiana’s so-called cancer alley between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
“I’m living in a sacrifice zone due to the polluting and poorly regulated oil and gas industry,” Hunkler said. “Now the petrochemical industry will create even more toxic air pollution in the Ohio River Valley.
“The regulatory agencies have already failed to protect communities from air and water pollution, and now are promoting cracking to make plastic, which is the last thing this beautiful planet needs.”
