‘Incredibly promising’: the bubble barrier extracting plastic from a Dutch river

‘Incredibly promising’: the bubble barrier extracting plastic from a Dutch river

Technology applied to Oude Rign river helps stop plastic pollution reaching sea

The Great Bubble Barrier’s concept in operation in Amsterdam.

Five years ago, Claar-els van Delft began to suspect that plastic waste on the beach at Katwijk in the Netherlands did not come from visitors, or the sea, but from the mouth of a nearby river.

“We started picking up litter and we noticed, near the river entrance, pieces that came from fresh water – all kinds of plastic,” she says. “Tampon sheaths, brush bristles, but also crisp packages, drink packages, everything.”

Sure enough, when volunteers sifted through an oil drum full of Oude Rijn river water, in between the duckweed they saw tiny plastic particles. “We saw so much pollution, we were shocked,” says van Delft, the co-founder of the local charity Coast Busters.

How bubble barrier works

Fast forward to July 2022, and Katwijk is the site for the world’s first river “bubble barrier” – an experimental concept where a 120-metre stream of rising bubbles, plus the water current, pushes plastic waste to one side in order to be collected.

“We place a perforated tube on the bottom of the waterway, at an angle, and then pump through compressed air: the rising air bubbles create an upward current that will lift plastic from the water column to the surface, and then at the surface – together with the flow of the river – it is all pushed to one side,” explains Philip Ehrhorn, the chief technology officer at the Dutch startup The Great Bubble Barrier. “Here, we get the flow from the pumping station, or the wind can also push trash into the catchment system.”

The company, run by a team of keen sailors, surfers and water enthusiasts, won an international Postcode Lottery Green Challenge in 2018 and started its first permanent pilot in a canal in Amsterdam the following year. Such is the promise of this trial that it has convinced the Rijnland water board, 12 municipalities and the Holland Rijnland and Zuid-Holland regions – along with Coast Busters and local fundraisers – to invest €470,000 to build their river bubble barrier.

Plastic removed from waterways is sorted as part of the barrier bubble study.

Jacco Knape, the deputy mayor at Katwijk municipality, said he saw the local plastic problem with his own eyes when he was invited to a beach litter cleanup. “Plastic pollution is a growing problem worldwide, affecting communities as well as the environment, [and] Katwijk is unfortunately no exception,” he says. “We notice plastic pollution by visitors to the beach, leaving wrappers and other plastic behind, but we are also the last stop before all the plastics collected along the Oude Rijn flow into the sea. With this bubble barrier we can stop those plastics.”

Bas Knapp, an executive board member at the Rijnland water board, believes the bubble barrier will not prevent fish migration, and is investing €42,000 a year to run it. “We did a test which showed that in the pumping station, only one in 233 pieces of plastic larger than 1mm is removed from the water [by its filter],” he says. “But with the bubble barrier, we expect between 86% and 90% of the plastic pollution to be removed. A trial was incredibly promising. This is one of our largest river mouths, and a really good place to put a promising pilot to work to try to reduce plastic going to the sea.”

Anne Marieke Eveleens, a co-founder of The Great Bubble Barrier, is working on scaling up the technique, discussing a potential barrier in an estuary in Portugal and another project in south-east Asia. “One of the requests we sometimes get is for a big international port like Rotterdam – there, it’s 20 metres deep but that is [currently] out of scope,” she admits. “It is also difficult if there are lots of ships, and they are dredging multiple times a year.”

But many believe the technique still has real promise for specific scenarios. Dr Frans Buschman, a researcher in environmental hydrodynamics from the independent institute Deltares, has tested the barrier in Amsterdam, using about 1,000 tagged tangerines. “We released them at several points and counted how many were captured,” he says. “From the side of the catchment system it was up to 90%; sometimes on the other side we noticed it was substantially lower, probably because there’s a one spot where the bubble intensity is not so high, and some tangerines were passing there.”

He adds that items that were fully floating could be blown over the bubble barrier by the wind, making it less effective, but believes it is still a “promising technique [with] great potential”.

Some researchers, however, point out that river plastics do not necessarily end up in the ocean, although they can still harm ecosystems and human livelihoods. Tim van Emmerik, an assistant professor at Wageningen University’s hydrology and quantitative water management group, says river systems also differ. “When thinking about rivers globally, just imagine how widely they can vary, from narrow canals in Amsterdam and Leiden, to great deltas like the Mekong,” he points out. “Most tech solutions, such as the Bubble Barrier, only cover a range of them, emphasising there will always be a need of a solution portfolio. Of course, consuming and polluting less plastics will help no matter where you go, and may in fact have the greatest impact.”

Back in Katwijk, there are plans to build a visitor and education centre next to the bubble barrier to do just that, and hopes are running high. Under the summer sun, a stream of gentle bubbles breaks the river surface, a little like a jacuzzi. “We were looking forward,” says van Delft, quite seriously, “to coming to the opening in a swimsuit!”

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This company is turning plastic trash into construction blocks

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

LOS ANGELES —

Imagine taking heaps and heaps of earth-polluting, unusable plastic waste and actually transforming it into something constructive?

Plastic pollution is a proliferating and increasingly overwhelming problem. By 2040, estimates indicate that as much as 710 million tons of solid plastic waste will clog up the earth’s ecosystem, in oceans, rivers and on land.

Los Angeles-based startup ByFusion has a plan for that waste. In fact, the business has created a system to collect the most troublesome type of plastic trash — the stuff that can’t be recycled.

Founded in 2017, the company has developed a machine that turns single-use plastics into something called “ByBlock.” Similar in size and shape to the concrete blocks commonly used in construction, ByBlocks are made entirely of reclaimed plastic waste.

“You’d be astounded at the things that cannot be recycled, which is basically everything you touch … stuff like pens, toothbrushes,” ByFusion’s CEO, Heidi Kujawa, told CNN Business. “The interesting thing about our technology is we specifically, entirely designed our system around the low value, no value stuff, everything that can’t be recycled.”

As she researched plastic waste, Kujawa learned that there are seven types of plastic, of which only two can be recycled. “In the past it used to go to China and other places that would buy it from us,” she said. “That dried up in 2017. Since then, we’ve been burning or burying that plastic.”

CNN

ByFusion’s Blocker System shreds plastic waste and compresses it in minutes into blocks.

CNN

Los Angeles-based startup ByFusion converts solid plastic waste that otherwise can’t be recycled into blocks that can be used for construction.

ByFusion’s machine, called the Blocker System, converts the discarded waste into building blocks without having to sort or pre-wash them, a major obstacle in the plastic recycling process.

After collecting the waste, it takes only minutes to shred the plastic is shredded and fuse it into solid blocks using steam and compression. The blocks are made without additives or fillers — 22 pounds of plastic create 22 pounds of ByBlock bricks.

“We’ve modeled our ByBlocks around the dimensions of a hollow cement block. Each is a 16 inch by 8 inch by 8 inch unit,” said Kujawa, and each brick is about 10 pounds lighter than a standard cement block.

A cement block has rebar running through it, but ByBlocks uses a method called post tensioning, which requires a steel rod. As a sustainable option for building material, the repurposed plastic can be used for commercial, residential and infrastructure projects, Kujawa said.

To that end, the business wants to partner with local governments, municipalities and corporations among other entities. It’s already selling both its Blocker System and completed ByBlocks but declined to specify customers or sales numbers thus far.

“From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to be as carbon neutral as possible. So our block, our systems and our manufacturing process is an all electric, no emissions process today,” Kujawa said.

The ultimate goal, she said, is to take the Blocker System to communities worldwide and enable them to repurpose plastic waste for use in local building projects. ByFusion hopes to be able to recycle 100 million tons of plastic by 2030.

“Every community struggles with plastic waste,” Kujawa said. “Putting in a Blocker [System] is going to help reduce landfill, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce transportation needs, all of that other good stuff.”

Blueland will help Twitter users recycle beauty products

Eco-friendly cleaning company Blueland is launching a Twitter service to help users recycle any beauty product—even from its competitors.

[Source Photos: Blueland]

By Talib Visram3 minute Read

Plastic packaging is responsible for almost half of the world’s plastic waste. It’s particularly flagrant in the personal care and beauty industry, which globally produces 120 billion units of packaging per year. The bottles and packs themselves scarcely contain recycling instructions, and they end up in landfills, oceans, and our bloodstreams.

Reducing those harms is the basis of a new initiative from Blueland, an eco-friendly cleaning company. Today, it’s launching a social media service that lets anyone tweet at the company for advice on how to recycle a beauty product—from any brand—and it will respond with information on proper disposal.

The resource aligns with Blueland’s mission of reducing waste—though it stresses that the ultimate solution is not recycling, but rather to consume less plastic overall.

The process is straightforward: Just tweet @Blueland with the name of the product (ideally with a photo) and where you live, and a representative will respond with information about how to dispose of it responsibly.

“It’s very simple, and that’s the beauty of it,” says Sarah Paiji Yoo, the company’s cofounder and CEO. She says there will be someone from Blueland on hand at all times to field Twitter queries, but that respondents will be doing manual research on the material in question, so it may take some time to get back to the user.

Having lived a zero-waste lifestyle with her family for the past four years, Paiji Yoo herself often reaches out to customer service departments to ascertain product packaging information, and she knows it’s not always a straightforward process. She admits that there may be instances when despite their best efforts, her team won’t be able to provide a clear answer.

Paiji Yoo says packaging details are much more common on cleaning products, down to the type of plastic used, whereas on beauty items often “you can’t even discern what material it is.”

Many companies avoid it because they use the small bottle space to tout the product—and sometimes it’s simply not recyclable. “It’s not something that brands are excited to be shouting from the rooftops,” she says. It’s also not federally required to provide packaging material or recycling information on product labels.

Recycling policies vary drastically by state and municipality. In Seattle and Connecticut, for instance, by law residents can be fined if they throw away too many recyclable goods; Vermont has a landfill ban on certain items. Additionally, many U.S. municipalities don’t even recycle glass.

The hope at Blueland is to offer granular-level advice to those who reach out, down to whether or not to remove bottle caps, which is preferable in many areas, but not in New York, with its very advanced, single-stream recycling system. Because of the difficulty of finding some information, Paiji Yoo warns candidly: “I am afraid that sometimes our answer is going to be: We actually don’t know.”

Blueland has been a pivotal influence in refill-and-reuse methods in the cleaning industry. Its staple is its “forever bottle,” whereby customers buy a bottle once and refill it with the company’s solid-form soap and cleaning tablets (and add water), minimizing single-use plastics. The company estimates that its sales have saved a billion single-use plastic bottles since its launch in 2019. It recently branched out of its home-cleaning niche with a body wash, and today it’s adding a facial cleanser, which is also refillable.

Blueland’s Twitter service will accommodate all brands, including rivals; because the company’s mission is to reduce waste, it puts a lot of effort into education and awareness.

“There is such a massive opportunity for us to really impact the broader industry, and that’s something that we’re so proud of having done in the cleaning space,” Paiji Yoo says, noting that the more consumers know about the recycling process, the more it can also influence which products they choose to purchase in the future.

Paiji Yoo stresses that the Twitter service isn’t a gimmick, and says she wants to continue it as long as there’s demand for the information. But she underscores that recycling isn’t the end solution to curbing waste—it’s just one part. The goal is to replace disposables with reusable materials.

“[Recycling] is still an imperfect solution,” she says. “Ultimately, we need to just consume less.”

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

In May 2021, Chile announced a legislative ban on single-use products in the food and beverage industry to take effect over the next three years.
Similar bans in other countries and cities also address the crux of the plastic pollution problem — the disposable culture — but Chile’s ban extends to other materials too, including cardboard and poly-coated paper.
In the lobbying process, the Chilean plastics association raised some concerns about the intricacies of the ban, but said it was ultimately “satisfied with the outcome.”

New legislation passed by the Chilean government in May 2021 aims to rid the nation of all single-use products in the food and beverage industry, including plastics, within three years. This is the first national-level legislation in the world to implement a ban on single-use F&B products, such as those made of plastic, cardboard and other materials, as opposed to targeting single-use plastics alone. It also follows Chile’s 2019 ban on plastic bags, which received some criticism for people swapping out disposable plastic bags for disposable paper ones, or overcollecting reusable bags.

Chile produces nearly 1 million metric tons of plastic trash a year, but recycles just 8.5% of it, according to a 2019 report by InvestChile. In comparison, Europe has a recycling rate of about 30%, according to another 2019 report by Hamburg-based research firm Statista.

The new legislation will significantly reduce Chile’s plastic waste while boosting the nation’s plastic recycling rates, experts say. This law is projected to eliminate an estimated 23,000 metric tons of single-use plastic pollution annually — the weight equivalent of 116 blue whales, according to a 2020 report by the NGO Oceana Chile.

“The plastic industry now realizes that we are not targeting plastics specifically, but the unnecessary use of single-use items,” Javiera Calisto, legal director of Oceana Chile, told Mongabay. Oceana Chile and its partner organizations were the teams responsible for the proposal and lobbying of this new bill over the past three years.

The law aims to reduce waste generation in three key ways: eliminating single-use products in the food and beverage industry, certifying plastic products, and regulating the use and composition of disposable plastic bottles.

“The law establishes different terms for the respective obligations to come into force. Since we’re making important changes, it was very important to be realistic,” Calisto said.

Plastic in garbage. — Chile produces nearly 1 million metric tons of plastic trash a year, but recycles just 8.5% of it, according to reports. Image by Chris Hunkeler via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

According to Oceana, plastic tableware such as straws, cutlery and stirrers will be banned from all eating establishments six months after the law is enacted. Other changes will have up to three years to come fully into force. This includes a requirement that at least 30% of bottled drinks in supermarkets must come in reusable bottles.

Other places in the world have taken similar action as Chile by taking a “hard measure” approach to eliminating single-use plastics. For instance, New York City, California, Hawai‘i, Kenya and the European Union have all banned single-use plastic bags in recent years.

As of July 2018, 127 out of 192 countries have adopted full or partial bans against plastic bags, while 57 countries have imposed a plastic bag tax on either the producer or consumer at the national level, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme.

But these legislations are far from perfect. Common criticisms against increasingly popular plastic bans include the fact that they harm poor nations and people the most, and merely encourage the uptake of equally harmful alternatives. This was the case when Chileans began amassing huge amounts of reusable bags following the countrywide ban on plastic bags in 2019.

Chile’s newest law will apply to single-use products including plastic utensils, poly-coated paper cups, disposable cardboard trays and single-use chopsticks, as opposed to single-use plastics alone. Single-use products have been defined as any F&B utensil that is not “used by the establishment on multiple occasions in accordance to their design,” regardless of the material they’re made of.

Plastic cutlery pollution. — Chile’s newest law will apply to single-use products including plastic utensils, poly-coated paper cups, disposable cardboard trays and single-use chopsticks, as opposed to single-use plastics alone. Image by Brian Yurasits via Unsplash.

Change in the works

Under this legislation, restaurants that fail to comply can be fined up to around 327,000 Chilean pesos ($360) per product, and supermarkets can be fined 1.3 million pesos ($1,435) per reported case.

Some establishments have already made the switch to reusables. At Mallplaza Egaña, a shopping mall, reusable cutlery and utensils such as including plates, cups and stirrers have replaced all single-use plastics in its food gardens.

Antonio Braghetto, operations manager of the Mallplaza mall franchise in Chile, told Mongabay in an email that the legislations imposed in Chile in recent years have helped “mobilize organizations” along the path to a zero-waste economy.

The new law might also prove crucial in finally addressing the carbon footprint of the plastics industry.

For instance, the law requires that disposable plastic bottles in Chile must be composed of a percentage of plastic that has been collected and recycled within the country. The Ministry of Environment will enforce and regulate this process through a plastic certification process. However, the exact percentage, or what qualifies as “recycled” material, is unclear.

Plastic manufacture is often overlooked as a significant source of carbon emissions. For example, in the U.S., plastic manufacturing is expected to overtake coal plant emissions by 2030. At the same time, recycling rates have never surpassed 9% in the U.S., and plastics companies have been found to overstate the feasibility of recycling plastics since the 1970s, Mongabay previously reported.

“Only upstream measures such as a cap on plastic production will prevent further degradation of our life-supporting ecosystems,” Melanie Bergmann, a plastic pollution and microplastic expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, said in a previous Mongabay article.

Some establishments have made the switch to reusable cutlery and utensils such as including plates, cups and stirrers in the place of single-use plastics. Image courtesy of María Jose Arancibia/Mallplaza.

The plastic prerogative

An estimated 12 million to 14 million metric tons of plastics enter the ocean every year, according to the IUCN. It’s not known what proportion of this can be attributed to single-use plastics, though these are the “most visible” forms of pollution, IUCN plastics expert Joao Sousa told Mongabay in an email.

Yet, plastics also have their benefits, Sousa said. Their cost-effective, durable, lightweight and waterproof nature is precisely what makes plastics so versatile and lucrative.

This time, the Chilean Plastics Association (Asociación Gremial de Industriales del Plástico de Chile, or Asipla for short) was part of the meetings held with the Chilean senate and other officials for the drafting of Chile’s newest law against single-use plastics.

“Even though we were 100% conscious about the impact of plastics on the environment, we also are convinced of the many undeniable advantages that plastic has given society since its existence,” Magdalena Balcells, general manager of Asipla, told Mongabay.

Without plastics, for example, the world wouldn’t have the face masks (N95 masks are made from synthetic plastic fibers) or medical equipment necessary for managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Seventy-five percent of the waste found on Chile’s beaches is plastic litter. Image courtesy of Javiera Castilo/Oceana.

“We all want to have fewer residues in the world — it’s not just plastic, but glass, paper, cardboard, and aluminum. But if it’s unfeasible, we are not doing any favors to the environment,” Balcells added when asked about Asipla’s experience being included in Chile’s bill-drafting process this time around.

The various parties “had their differences,” Balcells said. Proposals to ban the production of PET bottles altogether or to deem all forms of packaging as single-use materials were floated, but ultimately ruled unfeasible. But the parties involved eventually met in the middle.

“We are very satisfied with the outcome,” Balcells said. “Though the scope is not huge, it is visible enough for people to change their habits. And that’s a very good thing.”

Banner image: A neighborhood store in Chile with a sign proclaiming they are no longer delivering plastic bags. Image by LuisCG11 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Citations:

Oceana Chile. (2020). Estimación de la disminución de desechos plásticos de un solo uso producto de su regulación. Retrieved from https://chile.oceana.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/informe_plasticos_digital.pdf

Statista. (2019). The plastic dilemma: 348 million tons of plastic produced per year worldwide, half of which becomes waste. Retrieved from https://mailchi.mp/statista/plastic-waste-dossierplus?e=c7c3bf2bc7

Taylor, R. L., & Villas‐Boas, S. B. (2016). Bans vs. fees: Disposable carryout bag policies and bag usage. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 38(2), 351-372.

UNEP. (2018). Legal limits on single-use plastics and Microplastics: A global review of national laws and regulations. Retrieved from https://www.unep.org/resources/publication/legal-limits-single-use-plastics-and-microplastics-global-review-national

Conservation, Environment, Environmental Law, Environmental Policy, Green, Interns, Law, Oceans, Plastic, Pollution, Sustainability, Water Pollution

As India bans disposable plastic, Tamil Nadu offers lessons

Tamil Nadu’s ban on single-use plastic has gotten results, thanks to relentless policing. Now, India says it will tackle the problem nationwide.

CHENNAI, India — Amul Vasudevan, a vegetable hawker in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, thought she was going to go out of business.

The state had forbidden retailers to use disposable plastic bags, which were critical for her livelihood because they were so cheap. She could not afford to switch to selling her wares in reusable cloth bags.

Tamil Nadu was not the first state in India to try to curtail plastic pollution, but unlike others it was relentless in enforcing its law. Ms. Vasudevan was fined repeatedly for using throwaway bags.

Now, three years after the ban took effect, Ms. Vasudevan’s use of plastic bags has decreased by more than two-thirds; most of her customers bring cloth bags. Many streets in this state of more than 80 million people are largely free of plastic waste.

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

Yet Tamil Nadu’s ban is far from an absolute success. Many people still defy it, finding the alternatives to plastic either too expensive or too inconvenient. The state’s experience offers lessons for the rest of India, where an ambitious countrywide ban on making, importing, selling and using some single-use plastic took effect this month.

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INDIA

New

Delhi

INDIA

Chennai

Detail

area

Nemam

Bay of

Bengal

NILGIRIS DISTRICT

TAMIL NADU

Madurai

SRI

LANKA

Gulf of

Mannar

50 mileS

“Plastic bags can only be eliminated if the customer decides it, not the seller,” Ms. Vasudevan said from her stall on Muthu Street in Chennai, the state capital. “Getting rid of it is a slow process; it can’t happen overnight.”

Across India’s metropolises and villages, daily life is intertwined with disposable plastic, considered one of the worst environmental hazards. Shopping of all sorts is carried home in throwaway bags, and food is served on single-use dishes and trays. The country is the world’s third-biggest producer of disposable plastic waste, after China and the United States.

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

But now Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has banned some of those ubiquitous items, including disposable cups, plates, cutlery, straws and ear swabs. Single-use bags are forbidden, but thicker, reusable ones are allowed. The ban does not include soda bottles and plastic packaging for chips and other snacks.

India follows places like Bangladesh, the European Union and China in a large-scale effort to reduce plastic waste. But its plan is among the most ambitious, experts said, as it targets the entire supply chain, from the making to the use of disposable plastics.

What remains to be seen is how committed the authorities will be to enforcing the new law.

“A blanket ban is very difficult to implement unless local governments take strict actions against the violators and build partnership with people,” said Ravi Agarwal, who heads Toxics Link, an advocacy group that focuses on waste management. “Otherwise we will end up with some sporadic fines here and there, and some newspaper reports.”

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

Last year, the federal government banned very thin plastic bags, but enforcement, left to local authorities, was not stringent. Enforcing the new law is also up to local authorities, but now the government says it will involve the public, who will be able to report violators and their locations with an app.

Public pressure on politicians — to fix drain and sewage blockages caused by plastic, for example — is another key reason for the relative success in Tamil Nadu.

On a recent Friday morning, plainclothes police officers milled about Muthu Street, hunting for perpetrators. Near a section of hawkers selling vegetables and jasmine flowers, they found a street vendor bagging up produce for customers in disposable bags. The police fined that vendor and proceeded to seize dozens of pounds of the contraband from others, fining them and threatening them with prison.

Since December 2019, authorities in the state have collected more than $1.3 million in fines; the smallest is about $7. But the job is never-ending — after the officers dispersed that day on Muthu Street, some vendors resumed using the banned bags.

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

“We have to find cheap solutions to stop the use of plastic bags,” said Ms. Vasudevan, who was not fined that day. “The rich understand what is at stake, but for the poor the government has to make cloth bags cheap.”

Tamil Nadu has tried to address that issue with subsidies and campaigns promoting cloth bags.

At the entrance of Chennai’s Koyembedu wholesale market, the authorities installed two vending machines that hold 800 cloth bags, which go for 12 cents each. The machines are refilled twice a day. While the ban has undoubtedly hurt livelihoods, such as people involved in making and selling single-use plastic, it has been a boon to others.

About 25 miles west of Chennai, in the village of Nemam, around two dozen seamstresses churn out cloth bags while Bollywood music plays. Part of a cooperative, they have been able to increase their own earnings by making more bags.

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

“We are producing more cloth bags than we ever have,” said Deepika Sarvanan, head of an all-woman local self-help group, which was initially funded by the government but now sustains itself. “We are not producing even 0.1 percent of the demand.”

But for some businesses, like those selling live fish, plastic is hard to replace. “No one wants to destroy the environment,” said Mageesh Kumar, who sells pet fish at the Kolather market in Chennai. “But if we don’t sell them in plastic there is no other way; how will we feed our families?”

For now, Mr. Kumar and his cohort are using thicker bags that they ask customers to return.

Still, Tamil Nadu has made more progress than other states that have tried to curtail plastic use. Its beaches, residential enclaves and industrial areas are largely devoid of plastic litter. Many residents dutifully collect plastic for recycling and separate waste.

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

The trailblazer in the state was the district of Nilgiri, an area popular with tourists for its hill towns and tea plantations, which banned disposable plastic in 2000. There, the charge was led by Supriya Sahu, a civil servant who realized the dangers of plastic pollution after she saw pictures of dead bison with plastic bags in their stomachs. She started a public awareness campaign.

“We made people understand that if you want tourism to survive, we have to stop using plastic,” said Ms. Sahu, who is now a state-level environmental official. “Any government-led program can only be successful if it becomes a people’s movement.”

On a recent humid afternoon, the Koyembedu market offered a sign of success. Out of more than two dozen shops, only two were selling flowers packed in plastic.

“We have been selling flowers wrapped in newspapers for years now,” said Richard Edison, a flower seller. “People are demanding it.”

Anindito Mukherjee for The New York Times

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

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

Green sea turtle hatchling was missing a flipper when it was found lying on its back in a rockpool and taken to Taronga zoo

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Tiny green sea turtle hatchling rescued from a Sydney beach weighed just 127 grams when it was found.

A baby green sea turtle rescued from a Sydney beach had eaten so much plastic that it took six days for the contents to be excreted, according to Taronga zoo’s wildlife hospital.

The 127-gram hatchling was found lying on its back in a rockpool near Sydney’s Tamarama beach. It was missing one of its four flippers, had a chip in another, and had a hole in its shell.

Carers said that aside from these injuries, the turtle appeared to be in good physical condition and had no trouble swimming.

Tiny green sea turtle hatchling rescued from Tamarama beach in Sydney was missing a flipper

“But then it started to defecate, and it defecated plastic for six days. No faeces came out, just pure plastic,” the Taronga veterinary nurse Sarah Male said.

“It was all different sizes, colours and compositions. Some were hard, some were sharp, and with some, you could tell the plastic had writing on it. This is all some of these poor little things are eating. There’s so much plastic around they’re just consuming it as their first initial food,” she said.

Male has described the turtle, which has returned to health and now weighs almost 400g, as a “bagel with flippers”.

Despite progress, it could be a whole year before he is released back into the wild and coastal waters.

Rescued green turtle hatchling poos pure plastic for six days straight – video

The hospital says the size of tiny hatchlings makes them particularly vulnerable to prey, and they want the animal to have the best chance of life. As well as size, ocean temperatures are also a factor – warmer waters are better for turtles.

Taronga’s wildlife hospital cares for up to 80 marine turtles a year – many admitted with injuries after becoming entangled in fishing lines or from digesting hooks and plastics.

NSW plastic bag ban: how will it work and what will be gained from it?

“If everybody just takes a little bit of their time to pick up a bit of rubbish – it doesn’t have to be on the beach – then hopefully we can make a difference,” Male said.

States including New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, have all brought in tougher bans on single-use plastic, but the scale of the problem is at times overwhelming.

More than 8m tonnes pour into oceans around the world each year. The majority is carried out to sea by rivers, dumped along coastlines or abandoned by fishing vessels.

A study of a beach on Henderson Island, one of the world’s most remote places, found nearly 38m pieces of plastic strewn across the sand.

However, CSIRO researchers reported in June that local actions were making a difference with the amount of plastic pollution on Australia’s coast decreasing by up to 30% on average as a result of work by local governments to reduce litter.

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

Humanity’s impact on the environment has never been more prominent, with a recent government report finding increasingly more severe weather events and less biodiversity.

But one environmental issue, recently named by the UN as one of the world’s biggest problems along with climate change, has flown under the radar.

Tens of millions of tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year, either washing onto coastlines or accumulating into giant ocean garbage patches, where they can spend decades breaking down into toxic microplastics that are next to impossible to remove.

And with global plastic production doubling every decade or so, this problem is only expected to get worse.

But experts say it’s not all doom and gloom. Mounting global efforts to reduce plastic waste reaching oceans, coupled with cutting-edge removal technologies, could reduce the impacts of ocean plastics on marine wildlife and the global ecosystem.

A good news, bad news story

In 1865, a US billiard ball manufacturer posted a newspaper ad offering $10,000 (about $250,000 today) to anyone who could replace solid ivory billiard balls with a suitable material that could be mass produced without the wholesale slaughter of elephants.

Although the celluloid billiard ball failed to win the $10,000 prize, it did start a global plastics revolution that has since taken over the world.

Associate professor of marine science at Sunshine Coast University, Dr Kathy Townsend, said plastic is a “good news, bad news story”.

“We’ve got this amazing material that’s really light, it’s inexpensive, and we can adapt it to all sorts of different shapes and sizes,” Dr Townsend told The New Daily.

“And it’s really been sort of like our modern miracle, including for things like medical use.

“But the problem is that we haven’t been very smart about how we’ve utilised the plastic that we’ve been creating.”

In 2016, the world produced more than 380 million tonnes of plastic.

That same year, as much as 23 million tonnes of plastic—or 11 per cent of the world’s plastic waste that year—entered the ocean, according to Science.

And with plastic production having more than doubled since 2000, that figure is expected to balloon to 53 billion tonnes by 2030.

Today, the world’s oceans contain as much as two hundred million tonnes of plastic, or about 10 per cent of the biomass of all fish.

By 2050, it is estimated plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish.

Rubbish islands and plastic snow

Most of the plastic that ends up in the ocean comes from mismanaged waste created on land, which is then carried out to sea on rivers.

It’s then swept on ocean currents into ‘gyres’, or giant vortexes that concentrate floating debris into giant patches, some as big as Queensland.

“There’s basically rubbish patches in every ocean of the world,” Dr Townsend said.

“And this is obviously a problem because animals hang out in those sorts of collections as well.”

Before plastic, ocean gyres would collect biological material, making them fruitful feeding grounds for marine wildlife, such as fish, turtles, whales and seabirds, Dr Townsend said.

Marine animals can get entangled in ocean plastics, causing lacerations, amputations, septicaemia, or even drowning. Or they can ingest the plastic.

“We estimate about a third of the sea turtles around the Australian coastline have consumed marine debris,” Dr Townsend said.

“But some places in the world like South America, for example, every single turtle that they’ve opened up, they found plastic in their gut.”

Ocean plastics will also break down in the wind, waves, and sun into microplastics that can be toxic to animals, including humans.

Cleaning up microplastics is difficult. *Photo: Getty.*

“And it’s everywhere,” Dr Townsend said.

“In your water bottle, it’s in the water that you drink.

“It’s been found absolutely everywhere across the planet. From snow on the highest mountains in the world, to the very deepest trenches in the ocean.”

The global cleanup

Because cleaning up microplastics is so difficult, the greatest chance we have of reducing plastic pollution in the ocean is by preventing it from reaching the ocean in the first place.

Last month, Australia and 20 other countries signed a global commitment to reduce ocean plastic pollution at the UN Ocean Conference.

Australia now joins more than 500 countries in agreeing to set ambitious goals to minimise waste mismanagement and maximise circular economy solutions.

Circular economy solutions reduce waste and greenhouse emissions by substituting resources that need to be cultivated or mined with waste.

“It’s not a straightforward solution,” Dr Townsend said.

“And that is why [ocean plastic pollution] has been labelled as a wicked problem, and why the UN has earmarked it as being one of the one of the world’s big global problems along with, of course, climate change.

“Am I optimistic we can fix this? One hundred per cent I am, because we have the technology.”

This week Dutch not-for-profit The Ocean Cleanup removed its 100th tonne of garbage from the great Pacific garbage patch by dragging giant nets behind container ships, though not without controversy.

Other, less invasive cleanup methods have achieved historic success.

But there’s a long way to go—on average Australia alone releases 100 tonnes of plastic into the ocean every seven hours.

Much of the plastic recovered from the ocean cannot be recycled through traditional means, but has been used to make highly durable construction materials that can replace emissions-heavy concrete.

But Dr Townsend said individuals can play a role too.

“People in their day-to-day lives, even though they don’t necessarily feel it, can actually make a difference,” she said.

“Making sure you take a reusable bottle with you, using a reusable coffee cup.

“Twenty thousand people doing it imperfectly is much better than one person doing it perfectly. Because it all adds up.”

Southern Spain’s ‘Sea of Plastic’ may actually cool the local climate

The man in the hoodie slips out from his hiding spot near the crime scene and makes a run for it. But brooding Detective Héctor Tarancón spots him. Whipping off his sunglasses to tell us that he means business, the supercop of few words and many pensive expressions takes off in pursuit. The two men race down narrow dirt streets lined with low, identical structures, one after another after another.

The suspect smashes through one of the walls—not that impressive, actually, since it’s just a thin sheet of plastic—and disappears before Tarancón turns the corner behind him. He has vanished. Thwarted for now, the detective slips his shades back on as the camera pulls back, revealing that he is surrounded by an expanse of white greenhouses. They gleam under the strong sun in a cloudless Mediterranean sky, and stretch all the way to red-brown mountains on the horizon.

The setting for the Spanish crime melodrama Mar de Plástico (Sea of Plastic) may look computer-generated, but the location is real. The series was filmed in southeastern Spain’s Almería province, which has been transformed over the last half-century from sparsely populated, semi-arid scrubland into a bustling agricultural powerhouse. The key to Almería’s fruit and veg boom has been cloudless skies, accessible groundwater, and plastic. Lots and lots of plastic.

Rows of plastic greenhouses have overtaken semi-arid scrublands in southeastern Spain, particularly in the province of Almería. makasana photo/Alamy

Plastic greenhouses take up nearly 100,000 acres along the coast and creep up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Despite the region’s miniscule precipitation—less than nine inches of rain fall there annually, and virtually none of it from May to September—drip irrigation drawing from local aquifers allows farmers to grow more than three million tons of tomatoes, berries, and other crops annually.

According to a paper published in 2019 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, while most of the greenhouse farms are small, family-owned operations, they employ about 100,000 foreign laborers. More than 110 nationalities, primarily from Africa and Eastern Europe, work in the greenhouses or adjacent industries, such as packing and transportation. Despite the economic boost the sea of plastic has given the province, multiple media reports have documented poor working and housing conditions for many of the foreign workers, leading to charges of exploitation.

The explosion in the number of greenhouses, and the massive influx of people who grow and process the crops they produce, has also been hard on local nature. Numerous environmental groups have raised concerns about overuse of groundwater resources—once depleted, aquifers may take centuries to recover. The region is also considered a biodiversity hotspot, but many of its native plants, which evolved to occupy a narrow ecological niche, are particularly susceptible to changes in their environment, including habitat degradation. Of the two dozen or so native plants exclusive to Almería, six are critically endangered, including the trailing, yellow-flowered Gadoria falukei, discovered only in 2017.

The critically endangered Gadoria falukei is found only in Almería. Courtesy Juan F. Mota Poveda

Surprisingly, the greenhouses may provide a subtle assist in regulating the region’s climate. A handful of papers published by scientists at the University of Almería have suggested that all that bright white plastic may be reflecting sunlight back into space and effectively cooling the province. A 2008 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, for example, found that while overall temperatures have risen in this region of Spain, Almería has experienced a drop in temperature of about half a degree Fahrenheit. Limited subsequent research has been less conclusive about the reason for this dip, however.

In May 2022, NASA's Landsat 9 captured this natural color image of greenhouses surrounding El Ejido, in the Spanish province of Almería. — In May 2022, NASA’s Landsat 9 captured this natural color image of greenhouses surrounding El Ejido, in the Spanish province of Almería. NASA Earth Observatory/Public Domain

While the impact of the greenhouses on the local environment and climate remains uncertain, there are signs that change is again coming to the region. Growing international concerns about global “plasticulture,” such as a 2021 United Nations report that highlighted its negative long-term impact on the environment and public health, are creating pressure for more sustainable methods of agriculture. For now, however, the sea of plastic remains as it has been for decades: a dazzling white patchwork visible from space, and a maze on the ground through which TV cops give chase.

Human pathogens are hitching a ride on floating plastic

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The plastics had only been submerged in the ocean off Falmouth, England, for a week, but in that time a thin layer of biofilm, a slimy mix of mucus and microbes, had already developed on their surfaces. Michiel Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Exeter in England, had sunk five different types of plastic as a test. He and his colleagues wanted to know which of the myriad microbes living in the ocean would glom on to these introduced materials.

Vos and his colleagues’ chief concern was pathogenic bacteria. To understand the extent to which plastic can be colonized by potentially deadly bacteria, the scientists injected wax moth larvae with the biofilm. After a week, four percent of the larvae died. But four weeks later, after Vos and his team had let the plastics stew in the ocean for a bit longer, they repeated the test. This time, 65 percent of the wax moths died.

The scientists analyzed the biofilm: the plastics were covered in bacteria, including some known to make us sick. They found pathogenic bacteria responsible for causing urinary tract, skin, and stomach infections, pneumonia, and other illnesses. To make matters worse, these bacteria were also carrying a wide range of genes for antimicrobial resistance. “Plastics that you find in the water are rapidly colonized by bacteria, including pathogens,” says Vos. “And it doesn’t really matter what plastic it is.”

It’s not just bacteria that are hitching a ride on plastics. Biofilms on marine plastics can also harbor parasites, viruses, and toxic algae. With marine plastic pollution so ubiquitous—it’s been found everywhere from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to Arctic beaches—scientists are concerned that plastics are transporting these human pathogens around the oceans.

But whether plastics are bearing pathogen populations dense enough to actually be dangerous and whether they are carrying them to new areas are difficult questions to answer.

There are good reasons to believe that plastics are accumulating and spreading pathogens around the world. Linda Amaral-Zettler, a microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who coined the term plastisphere for the novel ecosystem plastics create, says plastic is different from other hard surfaces one often finds in the ocean—such as logs, shells, and rocks—because plastic is durable, long-lived, and a lot of it floats. “That gives it mobility,” she says.

Plastics can travel long distances. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, for example, many identifiably Japanese objects washed up on the west coast of North America. This litter, says Amaral Zettler, has “the potential to transport anything attached to it.”

Recent laboratory work also shows that some typically terrestrial disease-causing parasites can survive in seawater and infect marine mammals. Karen Shapiro, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, Davis, showed that these protozoan parasites—specifically, Toxoplasma gondii, Cryptosporidium parvum, and Giardia enterica—can attach to microplastics in seawater. This could be altering where, when, and how these parasites accumulate in the ocean.

“If they are hitching a ride on plastics that happen to be in the same sewer outlet, or river, or overland runoff from a storm drain, then they will end up where the plastic ends up,” Shapiro explains. That could be in shellfish on the seafloor, or floating on currents in the middle of the ocean.

The next step, Shapiro explains, is to look for a similar association between parasites and plastics outside the lab.

That microplastic pollution appears to be a breeding ground for pathogens raises, for Vos, a long-term concern as well—that plastics might be promoting the spread of antibiotic resistance. Bacteria can exchange genes, and since the bacteria are in close contact on the surface of tiny microplastics, the level of horizontal gene transfer between them is high, he says. Plastics can also put bacteria in close contact with pesticides and other pollutants, which also stick to biofilms. This encourages the development of antimicrobial resistance.

“We don’t know that much about it,” Vos says, “but there’s potentially interesting ways in which bacteria can experience stronger selection [for antimicrobial resistance] on plastics, but also have more opportunity to exchange genes that could confer resistance.”

As well as posing potential risks to human health, plastic-borne pathogens could threaten marine ecosystems and food supply chains, Amaral-Zettler says. Millions of people rely on seafood as a source of protein, and there are many pathogens that infect the fish and shellfish we eat. It might be possible, Amaral-Zettler says, for microplastics to spread diseases between different aquaculture and fishing areas.

Even though we don’t fully understand the risks, these studies are yet another good argument for limiting plastic pollution, Vos says. “There can’t be anything positive about plastics with pathogens floating around.”

LISTEN: Max Aung on hidden toxic threats

Dr. Max Aung joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss the dangers of some everyday chemicals to our health—and how regulation hasn’t kept up with these threats.

Aung, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and assistant director at the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice program, also talks about how pregnant people and babies are most vulnerable to these pervasive exposures.

The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.

Listen below to our discussion with Aung, and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Transcript

Brian Bienkowski

All right, today’s guest hanging out is Dr. Max Aung, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and assistant director at the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice program. Aung talks about the mix of insidious pollutant exposures we all face, how these exposures impact the most vulnerable among us, and how policy can catch up to the ever growing list of concerning chemicals. Enjoy.

So Max, it is good to see you. But I will full disclosure for the listeners, I see you quite a bit now, you are part of the agents of change program, you are now an assistant director. And you were also part of our first cohort, and you wrote an essay about oil and gas development where you grew up. So I just want to start there, if you could tell me a little bit about what that experience was like, as a researcher being out there with your views and thoughts, what the reception was, to your article and a little bit about the work you’re doing now with us?

Max Aung

Yeah, so, you know, the article was such a great opportunity for me to reflect on the sort of environmental issues that are facing communities that have high oil and gas production. But it was also interesting, because having grown up there, you know, I’ve, I’ve had friends that work in the oil and gas fields, that’s like their first job out of high school, it pays really well. You know, it’s it’s basically the source of economic growth for a lot of folks in those communities. So, in my essay touched on that a bit – thinking about, you know, sort of how even though these have environmental impacts these different industries, there’s also this issue of like, how do you deal with folks that rely on this for their everyday lives? So I think, you know, when I wrote the essay, it was largely, you know, well received from I had some folks, you know, reach out to me, and, tell me that, that they found the article to be an important reflection on that balance. I’ve had, we got this article invited to be like in a undergraduate textbook chapter, which was really exciting, you know, that new scholars will be reading this as they think about creative writing and reflecting on environmental issues. And, yeah, so, you know, I think that’s sort of been a great foundation, as I’ve sort of navigated this next stage of my career and thinking about ways to incorporate communities and think about communities inputs, as we tried to shape policy, environmental policy. And so that’s been a huge factor, especially with some of my work at UCSF, which, you know, we can talk a little bit more about later on. In terms of the [Agents of Change] program, so I joined the leadership here in March. And it’s been really exciting because I’ve been working really closely with Dr. Ami Zota, you and Yoshi as well, and just thinking through different ways that we can engage existing scholars in the program, but also ways that we can, you know, galvanize the new cohorts towards different focus groups and thinking about how can we leverage that skill in terms of outreach and in terms of getting our Agents of Change fellows out there to you know, communicate with important stakeholders. So that’s been really exciting so far.

Brian Bienkowski

Good. And it’s so awesome to be part of the program and already a few years in have people like yourself who are part of it, who have now grown in your career and have new positions, and then come back. I mean for me when I started this, to already see people like you coming back and being a part of it after being in the first cohort, is just, it’s just wild how kind of fast time flies, but it’s been really excellent. And just for people listeners who maybe didn’t read your essay, so it was focused in Kern County, California, right?

Max Aung

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Bienkowski

You’re right. And I really appreciated the idea of thinking about the economic ramifications. I thought that was one of the aspects of your essays that was crucial when we think about weaning off oil and gas or just trying to get rid of polluting, polluting industries, thinking about the people that rely on these for their livelihoods.

Max Aung

Yeah, and it was, you know, it’s so great. Like, during our sessions, like in that first fellowship year, just, you know, getting the feedback from you, workshopping it with the other fellows was such a great experience. Because I felt like, I was consistently challenged to think about every single word I put into that essay, and like the impact, you know, and not being afraid to say, radical, social justice oriented things. And I did feel like that was such a great learning experience, sort of go through that exercise.

Brian Bienkowski

Well, that’s great to hear. And I hope future folks feel the same way. That’s definitely the spirit of the program. And so you went to University of California, Santa Cruz for your undergrad, and I believe you’re at University of Michigan over here for your masters and your PhD – I love Ann Arbor, is such a fun town. What drew you to public health? And how did you come to start researching environmental exposures?

Max Aung

Yeah, so okay, at Santa Cruz, I’d say I gained a really diverse set of research and education experiences. So you know, my undergraduate training was in molecular biology. And so I was just really drawn to some of my more advanced coursework around immunology, and thinking about the different mechanisms that underlie various different health conditions. And that’s was sort of, you know, my bedrock in terms of the coursework. On the other end, I was doing research in a stable isotope laboratory, in the ocean sciences department, which is totally, you know, not, you know, totally different in terms of science, but like, just a totally different direction in terms of how to apply scientific research. And so in that lab, I was working with an exciting team to reconstruct past sea surface temperatures over the course of several thousands of years. So we…the Paleo climatology lab is very focused on trying to understand past climate conditions so that we have data to inform future climate models. So there’s this, you know, this duality between the molecular Health Sciences and more environmental, climate-change focused research. And I think, you know, trying to think through these two different experiences, it was a little bit next, like, after undergrad, you know? I struggled a little bit with trying to find my path forward.

And after undergrad, I actually, I took two years, where I wasn’t in school, I was teaching full time for a STEM diversity program that focus on retaining undergraduates from historically marginalized backgrounds in the STEM fields. And so during that time, it gave me a little bit more breathing room to like, think through sort of what are my next steps, and, I got involved with the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, so I was working with them in the summer. And through that, I started networking with all of these different – because they’re so well connected with all of these universities across the country – and, and through that I sort of got connected with different professors from different schools of public health. And as I was brainstorming through potential graduate training, and really tried to lean in on those background experiences. It became clear to me as I was learning about grad programs that something that would fulfill me is a blend of environmental research, plus Health Sciences, plus policy, right? And so I kind of converge it to like environmental health policy is like sort of where I was thinking. And then so when I was looking at different programs, you know, Michigan really stood out to me. They had a super strong Department of Environmental Health. And when I spoke to different faculty and different current students, it seemed like there was a lot of opportunity if you came in with environmental health to sort of branch out, and also gain skills in policy and some of the more data analysis, epidemiology heavy coursework.

So that’s the way, that’s the sort of path that brought me to Michigan. And at Michigan, you know, I don’t think any of this was planned, but I was able to receive this really exciting fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, it was called the Health Policy Research Scholars fellowship. And that really just amplified my health policy training. And it basically allowed me to integrate that type of training into my more science-heavy applications in environmental health. And so, you know, that’s sort of like my entry point into public health and the way I’ve been navigating it in terms of like, career trajectory.

Brian Bienkowski

What’s one place that you miss in Ann Arbor?

Max Aung

Oh. I love ramen. I think anybody that knows me really well knows that I’ll always, you know, go find like, the best ramen shop in any city I’m in. So there’s actually like a pretty, you know, delicious ramen place in downtown Ann Arbor called Slurping Turtle. And so that’s one place I miss. Where I was living most recently in Ann Arbor it’s in the middle of the campus and my home, or my former home. So like, you know, on the walk back, I had been known to just like, be like, alright, canceling dinner, cooking dinner, I’m just gonna get ramen.

Brian Bienkowski

Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot, there’s a lot in a town, that’s not huge. There’s a lot of super good food and good music and good places to get a drink. So, before we get on to how you’ve taken that environmental research and what you’re doing with it now, I wanted to ask you, what’s the defining moment that shaped your identity?

Max Aung

Oh, yeah, um, you know, I, so I think I can, you know, I could time travel back to a lot of different moments long, longer times ago, but I actually, I think, like in terms of something that’s really defined me, it’s like, for me, one of the experiences, most recently was, I was working at UCSF, and I had the opportunity to, basically, you know, co-lead my first big R1 proposal. And I think what was really exciting about this proposal was, I was focusing on basically trying to better understand mental health disparities among immigrant women, and focus on how environmental exposures are potentially impacting mental health disparities in this population. And I think what was like really pivotal for me as, as a scholar was, this is sort of a moment where, after I’ve developed all of the training, earned the PhD, got to this point in my career, I’m able to now develop research questions and research proposals that literally converge my identity as an immigrant scholar, but also focus on important salient problems that are impacting these communities. You know, I will say that grant hasn’t been funded yet. So we didn’t get it on the first try. But I, I will be persisting on it and trying again, and, reshaping it in different ways. But nonetheless, I still look back at that experience and think that it’s been a huge moment for me to I’m really just feel empowered to use my skills to, you know, and my lived experiences to pursue research that, that not very many folks are doing and I think is really important.

Brian Bienkowski

Yeah. And hopefully bettering science and shaping what environmental science looks like. And then take it one step further, hopefully making lives better, right?and in the communities you’re researching, or are looking into, in some way, having a positive impact. So that’s definitely a defining moment. I think that’s great. And hopefully it gets funded at some point.

Max Aung

Yeah, eventually I’m trying, I’m trying, you know, different ways to sort of get it funded. So crossing fingers.

Brian Bienkowski

So now you’re really broadly your focus now is on what we’re exposed to that impact our health and human development. So just just kind of a 10,000 foot view, walk me through some of the things that we’re exposed to that kind of keep you up at night? What are you looking at, exposure wise, that we should be concerned about?

Max Aung

Yeah, so. So, you know, historically, in terms of what I’ve done research on so far, I’ve focused a lot on endocrine disrupting chemicals. And this includes, for example, a lot of different chemicals found in plastics and different personal care products that you use on a daily basis, like lotions, shampoos. So you know, some chemicals include phalates, phenols, parabens, I’ve done a lot of research on these endocrine disrupting chemicals. Particularly, I’ve focused on how they’re influencing maternal health conditions, and potentially, what implications that has for infant health later in life. And sort of my core research applications in that space is to try to disentangle biological mechanisms, right? So that’s, that’s sort of in the bedrock of my PhD dissertation: identifying different biological pathways that might be affected by these chemicals, and trying to illustrate that in these different studies that that we’ve published, so that so that different scholars can learn about those mechanisms, and build on those when they think about risk assessment, and trying to identify high-risk scenarios with these high exposures and thinking about what pathways might be influenced by those exposures.

Brian Bienkowski

Can you talk a little bit about… so I think when we historically think about environmental pollution and things that harm us, we think of… let’s use lead for an example, the more lead that I’m exposed to, or that my nephew is exposed to, the more toxic it is. With endocrine disrupting compounds, it doesn’t always work that way, there can be very tiny amounts of exposure that that wreak havoc on the body and maybe at a higher exposure, it’s not the same. So can you talk a little bit about first of all, when we say endocrine disrupting compounds, what what we mean, and also kind of the challenge of identifying how toxic they are, because they don’t always behave like traditional toxics.

Max Aung

Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, so, just to set the baseline. So when we say endocrine disrupting chemicals, essentially, what that means is that these chemicals, especially, based on in vitro, mechanistic laboratory experiments, these chemicals have been shown to have properties where they can mimic hormone signaling, and they can essentially alter concentrations of different hormone production. And this has, I mean, even though we call them endocrine disrupting chemicals, this has wide implications for various different pathways, because not only can they affect the endocrine system and hormone production, but because the endocrine system is so intimately connected to the immune system, for example, these chemicals can also elicit inflammatory responses, so, they can, you know, cause immune cells to regulate these proteins that are involved with inflammation and this can have downstream effects on cardiovascular function on tissue damage. So, all sorts of different downstream effects. And that’s what makes these chemicals you know, very tricky to understand. Because if they’re affecting various different pathways, there’s all sorts of feedback loops that might be occurring. And disentangling those different feedback loops, and those different mechanisms is really challenging. In terms of the dosage, you know, what you’re saying is about the concentrations, and different levels of concentrations being important, that’s also a huge consideration, right? Because, you know, there’s some evidence that, you know, particular endocrine disrupting chemicals can have nonlinear relationships. So it’s like, even low doses can have effects, and maybe you might not see effects in the middle range, but then you might see effects in the higher range. And, you know, that’s really tricky, especially when you’re trying to investigate these chemicals in a large, prospective cohort, an epidemiology study, where you have a huge distribution of these chemicals, and the distribution might be different based on which study population you’re focusing on. So, yeah, all of those things are incredibly challenging. And, a lot of the research and collaborations I’m working on now, is these, you know, multi center, multi cohort investigations, where we’re integrating data across different birth cohorts. And that’s one of the ways that we can sort of tackle this problem is having a larger sample, a larger, diverse sample that we can have a better understanding of the different distributions of these exposures.

Brian Bienkowski

So, as you mentioned, a lot of your work is focused on babies, pregnant people, kind of fetal exposures. Can you talk about the specific vulnerabilities for these groups? And what we know about environmental exposures during this really critical window of development?

Max Aung

Yeah, so basically, a huge piece of my research is built on the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis, which proposes that early life exposures can have, can be affecting key biological processes in utero, that can essentially influence the trajectory of infant development for many, many years. So this could be metabolic health, this could be neurodevelopment. So particularly, I’ve been focused on neurodevelopment, and that’s where my research program is shifting towards right now, in terms of my funded projects. And what we’re seeing so far is that, from preliminary data, that maternal biomarker profiles that we’ve measured in some of our pilot studies are associated with early measures of infant neurodevelopment. So after pregnancy. And those same biomarkers are also associated with environmental chemicals, such as the phalates from the consumer products. And so you know, our running hypothesis is that these chemicals are influencing different biomarker profiles in the mom during pregnancy, and that’s potentially influencing key neurodevelopmental features in the developing fetus, and that’s persisting into infancy. And so that’s one of the major pieces that I’m trying to work on. And so right now, we’re building on that preliminary work, and we’re expanding it into multiple different cohorts measuring these biomarkers. And the idea is that, from the study, we’ll be able to characterize these early mechanisms of neurotoxicity, potential neurotoxicity, but then also, hopefully use these biomarkers as you know, potential predictive tools that we can help to identify potential neurodevelopmental outcomes later in life.

Brian Bienkowski

So just so I’m clear that the basic idea is that the mother is exposed to, or the pregnant person is exposed to a compound, and you’re seeing… and by biomarkers, what do you mean, what are you looking at?

Max Aung

Yeah, so there’s all sorts of biomarkers that you know that we, that I’ve been researching over the past few years. But most recently, I’ve been focusing on these targeted bioactive lipids, so this includes, you know, parent fatty acid compounds that folks get from, you know, essentially their diet like arachidonic acid, linoleic acid. And these fatty acid compounds are essential, and you know, you need them for key biological processes. And as a component of their essential function and role in physiology, they are metabolized into secondary molecules that can stimulate different things like immune responses, cardiovascular function, they’re also important for, you know, kidney function. So, these secondary molecules are really key signals of biological processes. And so, when you measure them, and then you see that there are altered levels, or different concentrations associated with higher concentrations of phalates, then you start to be concerned, because, you know, that essentially suggest that perhaps, that the chemicals are influencing that metabolism of those bioactive lipids, and if they’re influencing that metabolism, they might be influencing all those downstream processes that I just laid out. And that’s, you know, that’s when we start to find that there might be a problem with that, because those downstream processes could be influencing the developing fetus.

Brian Bienkowski

So using a lotion that has too much phalates could make your child have delayed development, maybe some kind of behavioral issues. I mean, are these the kinds of downstream impacts you’re looking up?

Max Aung

Well, we’re trying to disentangle that. It’ still very early stages in terms of those outcomes, but some of my colleagues in that I collaborate in these cohorts have found associations with dilates and altered infant neurodevelopmental parameters. And so we are seeing evidence so far that there are some associations. And so now that we’ve seen those relationships with dilates and neurodevelopment, this next stage that I’m proposing is trying to find these linking pathways, with these bioactive lipids that might be explaining some of these relationships.

Brian Bienkowski

And of course, as humans, we’re all eating perhaps produce that has pesticides, we’re putting on these lotions, we’re eating out of plastic containers, we’re walking outside where there’s heavy traffic, so we’re exposed to mixtures of pollutants all the time. So can you outline, you know, first, why that’s a challenge for researchers like yourself, and how folks like you try to best capture what these mixtures might be doing to us, or disentangling them? If that’s what you’re doing.

Max Aung

Yeah. So yeah, so thanks for bringing that up. You know, there’s, there’s hundreds of thousands of chemicals that were exposed to, and like you said, pesticides, and some pesticides have been shown in mechanistic models to be neurotoxic. So when you think about, you know, the cumulative exposures of pesticides, phthalates, toxic metals like lead, and, what is so challenging about understanding any single chemical class is that they’re not acting alone, right? You have these different exposures that are also influencing these biological pathways. And they’re also, through that mechanism, potentially influencing those outcomes like neurodevelopment. And so you know, what I’d say, in that space of disentangling the mechanisms. I think what’s really challenging is, you know, one of the studies I published like a couple of years ago is we looked at like four different chemical classes, you know, dilates, included toxic metals included, and we saw that they’re having these, in some cases, divergent associations with these biological pathways and these biomarkers, and so when you see divergent pathways, it’s really tricky because it’s hard to understand what that implication is in terms of the downstream effects. Like are they acting sort of against each other? like antagonistically? Is this an issue of temporality, where we’ve only measured the exposures once and the biomarkers once so we’re not capturing the bigger picture, right? So there’s a lot of unanswered questions in terms of like these mixture effects. But I think, in that chaos and confusion of all these different divergent relationships, I think there’s something really compelling in terms of this really emphasizes the need to look at chemicals as a whole mixture, because you’re going to miss things if you don’t, right? if you focus on just one chemical class, you’re really going to miss the fact that other chemical classes are having. And it’s, it’s really not conducive for risk assessment, you know, when you think when you’re ignoring those different chemical classes. And so, you know, in terms of taking the risk assessments and thinking of downstream policy implications, I think it’s really critical that we start to evolve from this one chemical at a time policy approach and thinking about all of these chemicals, cumulatively.

Brian Bienkowski

So that leads me nicely into my next question, and maybe that’s in part your answer. I was thinking about, I’ve been, personally, I’ve been writing about BPA for more than a decade now. And the bad news keeps coming. And the studies keep finding impacts, whether it’s animal studies, or correlational, human epidemiological studies, and it’s still not regulated, right, nothing happens. And one of the things I realized as a journalist pretty early on that I think is was surprising to me, and I think it’s surprising to other people is that everything on the shelf isn’t tested to the extent that you think it is. So, you know, we you’re talking about phalates and things that are probably in my shower right now. So, where’s the regulation failing? So maybe one one aspect you mentioned, is not looking at things as classes rather trying to look at them individually, but what else? What else could we or should we be doing?

Max Aung

That’s a, that’s a big question. You know, I think there’s so many different things we could be doing better. But, you know, one of the things for sure is, you know, in addition to looking at the cumulative effects is thinking about better capturing different routes of exposure and integrating that holistically – especially thinking about different historically marginalized communities as well, because there is historic exposure that needs to be accounted for in marginalized communities. So, you know, some communities are exposed to not only the phalates, but high levels of air pollution, toxic lead, there’s PFAS in the drinking water. So thinking about historical exposures as well is really important, because that really contextualizes the current state of the problem that those communities might be facing. Whereas if you just look at the chemical class in isolation, without thinking about those historic exposures, you’re going to underestimate the risk that those communities are experiencing.

Brian Bienkowski

What would you tell someone who’s an expecting mother?

Max Aung

That’s, you know, I think, what I would tell them is that, you know, well… I think in general, what I would tell folks is that a lot of the solutions, the really big impact solutions are going to come at the regulatory policy level, we can try to limit our exposures as a consumer by, you know, not using this product or that product. You know, avoiding different products, but that’s really so marginal in terms of exposure reduction. I think the onus should really be on regulators and industry to not use these chemicals and to use safer alternatives or if some of these chemicals are not essential, basically, yeah, like they shouldn’t be produced. So in terms of what I tell folks when they asked me about reducing things like, in addition to, you know, avoiding certain products, I would say, it’s really, also going to take a lot of civic engagement to push policymakers to make responsible decisions on reducing these harmful exposures. That’s really where the big-impact, exposure reduction is going to come from. And so, you know, I think that’s where we really have to invest our energy and our effort, as scientists as activists, and sort of pushing policymakers and industries to sort of do better.

Brian Bienkowski

Was there an “aha!” moment for you or something that you learned when you were researching these exposures that you don’t think most people would know about? Something kind of surprising, interesting, shocking.

Max Aung

You know, I think like, for me, it’s, it’s been… Well, the first part was just seeing how many chemicals we’re exposed to. It’s pretty alarming. And there’s estimates that there’s like, hundreds of thousands of registered and, you know, thousands of unregistered chemicals too, and that is really problematic, because as a scientist, it’s really, it’s really challenging to investigate the health effects of these chemicals, when there’s like such a large mountain of chemicals. And so I think that was been sort of a huge moment, in terms of the way I think about the problem. And it’s also compelled me to not only investigate them, to the best I can with these epi cohorts –we’re very limited in those cohorts on what we can measure, right, just because of costs– So that’s compelled me to, you know, in addition to focusing on those, also think about how we can drive policy forward. And one of the things I’ve been working on in my role at UCSF, in my past, while at UCSF and I’m still carrying it forward, is thinking about developing a framework to inform policy action when there’s limited research, and to sort of, how can we drive decision making forward? so that we can reduce exposures without having to necessarily conduct these large epi cohorts that will take many, many years to do. So finding that balance has been really tricky. And that’s, you know, something sort of that I’ve been focusing on a lot recently, and it’s really great in terms of bridging my policy bug right into my science hat.

Brian Bienkowski

I wonder if that might be the answer to my next question. I was thinking about a lot of everybody in the Agents of Change program, there’s a, there’s a real importance placed on using your research to spur positive change in communities. And I think in some instances, I’ve seen this with reporting, when we report on a fence-line community, and there’s a power plant, it’s a very clear link: these people are being harmed by this thing, how can we make that known and spur action? It’s easy, it’s local. Whereas what you’re looking at is so ubiquitous and big. And really, we’re all exposed to these compounds and in some communities more than others, but being such a big, unwieldy problem. I’m wondering how you go about trying to make that change happen?

Max Aung

Yeah, so that’s definitely an ongoing workshopping and brainstorming process. In terms of like, how I’ve been approaching it with my collaborators at UCSF, we’re developing thi framework for Environmental Health Policy. And the goal of the framework is to develop a process, a very transparent process for evaluating scientific evidence to inform policymakers to take action on an environmental contaminant. And so in that process, it requires the integration of key decision criteria, right? Like how will you balance the costs and benefits of an intervention? How do you balance environmental injustice and the potential to essentially push back against systemic racism? you know, how can the intervention do that in terms of environmental hazards? And in this process, like, I think the way that we’ve sort of started to approach it is bringing in key stakeholders, from NGOs, from the government, from different community organizations, and really listening, trying to listen on their input. And so that’s one of the most recent things we did in this project: [it] was to bring together a workshop of different key stakeholders. And so now going forward, you know, we’re synthesizing through that information. And as we develop future case studies and applications for our policy framework, I think, will continue to sort of bring in community engagement and really trying to get their input every step of the way, so that we’re impacting a potential intervention with their ideas in mind and very integrated into how we’re approaching the potential intervention or recommendation.

Brian Bienkowski

I remember talking to Dr. Reginald Seeley, who who spoke to the Agents of Change at some point. And he mentioned when he worked on The Hill for a little while, how incredibly busy policymakers are. This idea of you doing some of the work for them and taking the studies and running them through this project and giving them different outputs of “this would do this, And this would do that. And there’s benefits here cost saving here,” I think is brilliant.

Max Aung

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a big, it’s a big hill, but I think that, you know, I’m optimistic. And I think we have a stellar team of collaborators. And we’ve brought together a great steering committee to help guide us. It’s really exciting. So I’m hopeful that we can continue that work and really influence policymakers in the future.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent. I just have a couple more questions for you, Max. And this has been a really good time it is there anything else that you want to mention that you are optimistic about? Some of these topics are just heavy. What else out there gets you excited or hopeful?

Max Aung

Yeah, I think, you know, in terms of like, the science, I am pretty, I’m getting optimistic about how some of the funding opportunities that have been announced through the NIH, I’m starting to see more and more emphasis on important research that has implications for environmental justice. And not just NIH but also the EPA. There’s an environmental justice intent in some of these opportunities. So, I’m cautiously optimistic that they can influence positive change and promote social justice. You know, and hopefully, the folks that get these different funding mechanisms can incorporate community input, and really drive environmental justice forward. And I think there’s also a lot of potential in terms of a lot of initiatives that the Biden administration is doing, in terms of trying to integrate social justice into a lot of their regulatory frameworks. And so I think, I’m optimistic about that. I really hope it can be sustained after like the midterm elections, and hopefully in the next four years, but, we’ll see.

Brian Bienkowski

of living. Yeah, article, political realities. Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes But you know, I what I will say is the fact that there is an awareness, you know, easy for me to say I’m not a member of a community that is dealing with these things. But I think the fact that there is awareness right now is a positive step in itself. And hopefully that continues to bring about change. So Max, I have three rapid fire questions where you can just give me one word, or phrase and then we can, we can move on, get me out of here and the rest of your day. So one of my all time favorite movies

Max Aung

Moulin Rouge

Brian Bienkowski

When I have downtime, I am most likely

Max Aung

Cycling outdoors.

Brian Bienkowski

Oh, gosh, me too. I’m taking one as soon as we get done here. And I cannot I cannot start my day without

Max Aung

Coffee.

Brian Bienkowski

Perfect. We are two for three on matching each other there. And Max. My last question, what is the last book that you read for fun?

Max Aung

I just started reading this book called “On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous.” And I haven’t finished it yet. So I’ll let you know what when I finished it, but so far, it’s really poetic.

Brian Bienkowski

And who is the author on that?

Max Aung

I hope I’m pronouncing their name right. Ocean Vuong.

Brian Bienkowski

Yeah. “On Earth We’re briefly gorgeous.” I love the title.

Max Aung

Yeah, it’s a beautiful title. And their background is largely in, you know, in creative writing and poem. So it’s got that sort of that vibe in there quite a bit.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent. Well, Max, thank you so much for taking time today. I really mean it that I am so excited that you’re part of the team and I get to see you and talk to you and brainstorm with you on how to grow this program. So thank you so much for today.

Max Aung

Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me.