Spend an hour at any airport, mall, theme park or sporting event and you’ll find sandwiches double-wrapped in plastic, salads dressed up in styrofoam and the ubiquitous disposable forks and knives. 

These items contribute to the 350 million tons of petroleum-based plastic produced worldwide each year, much of which ends up in our oceans, our landfills and our bodies. Viable substitutes have remained elusive — few materials are as easy and cheap to produce. But as the number of cities and countries enacting bans on single-use plastic grows, so does the pressure — and the potential profits — involved in finding a more sustainable alternative.  

In Northeastern Germany, workers are putting the finishing touches on a 22,000-square-foot factory that Eduardo Gordillo believes could manufacture this alternative. “We want to make single-use plastic unnecessary worldwide,” says the CEO of the clean-tech startup Bio-Lutions. Starting this month, his factory will begin producing sustainable food packaging made of agricultural waste.

Based in Schwedt, a small city in the historic Uckermark region near the Polish border, Gordillo’s factory will process wheat straw, rape stalks, tomato stems and other fiber-rich ag-waste discarded by local farmers, as well as hemp waste from a nearby hemp fiber factory. “Everything in a radius of less than 100 miles so the transport does not kill our CO2 balance,” Gordillo says. Workers in the new factory will wash and shred the ag-waste, and feed the fibers through shoulder-high steel machines that resemble wood chippers. Through a patented mechanical process that uses no toxic chemicals, the waste is split into self-binding fibers that the workers then mold into various shapes.

Via Zoom, Gordillo shows bowls filled with shreds of wheat and straw, and then the finished products: clay-colored flower pots, plates and trays that feel like stiff cardboard. (To protect his proprietary process, he won’t disclose details about the patent or let journalists visit the new facility without signing a non-disclosure agreement.)

Bio-Lutions has been developing the novel process with Zelfo Technology, a Schwedt-based engineering firm that produces sustainable self-binding fibers. Last year, the companies won the Brandenburg Innovation Award for ingenuity. “We are going to start with containers for fruit, vegetables and meat,” Gordillo says. By autumn, he plans to add disposable cutlery and to-go cup lids to his roster — exactly the kind of products for which companies are scrambling to find plastic-free alternatives. (A caveat: the material wouldn’t be suitable for hot beverages or food because it would disintegrate.) 

Getting beyond greenwashing

There are countless instances of greenwashed  “biodegradable” and “bioplastic” products that take advantage of the fact that these terms are not clearly defined. What’s more, even true bioplastics have well-documented problems — many require precious resources, chemicals, GMO bacteria, or vast amounts of energy, and often only degrade in the high temperatures of industrial composting facilities. 

But Gordillo claims that his products are truly compostable and that his manufacturing process only requires four liters of water per kilogram of finished product, though his claims are impossible to verify until his packaging hits the European market. “You can actually bury them in your yard, and after about four months, they will have disintegrated,” he says. If an animal or even a human were to digest his material, he says, it wouldn’t harm them. 

Gordillo’s product is entering the market at a pivotal moment. As cities and countries around the world grapple with at-capacity landfills and stalled recycling systems, laws against single-use plastics are proliferating. Rwanda, Kenya, Taiwan and several Indian states were early adopters of full or partial single-use plastic bans. Now, an array of other cities and countries are poised to join them. 

The European Union has pledged to phase out single-use plastics in the coming years, and since July 2021 has banned items such as plastic plates, cutlery, q-tips, drinking straws, balloons and styrofoam cups. In Germany, suppliers are allowed to use up their existing stocks of these items, but are already prohibited from buying or producing more. Canada will implement a ban on a half-dozen common single-use plastic items this year. China banned plastic bags and utensils in major cities in 2020, and major chains are coming into compliance, though mom-and-pop stores lag behind. Even in the US, the world’s largest producer and user of plastics, lawmakers have attempted to enact national single-use plastic bans, but so far with no success.

Companies, too, have begun lobbying customers to bring their own reusable containers, though most still offer the option of disposables. The need to find alternatives is urgent — and complex. Which eco-friendly container will keep apples from getting smashed in transport? How do you keep fresh meat from spoiling without plastic?

Bagasse, the fibrous waste product left behind after squeezing sugar cane, wood and bamboo, have emerged as alternatives to plastic, but the products have been criticized by consumer agencies for its often murky origins and resource-intensive processing. For instance, when a German lab tested twelve bamboo cups that were marketed as sustainable, the researchers found synthetic components and toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde. It concluded that the cups were mislabeled and did not qualify as sustainable under the new law.  

An emerging market

Gordillo moved from Colombia to Hamburg, Germany, to marry the love of his life. At the start of his career, he designed standup displays for jewelry and cosmetics that were often discarded after one season. The birth of his daughter led him to question his career. “What kind of planet am I leaving her?” he asked himself. 

He decided to put his industrial design skills to work for sustainability. In 2017, he built his first production facility for compostable packaging in Bangalore, India, using similar technology as for the new one in Germany. At the time, the South Indian state government had announced a ban on single-use plastics; Gordillo was euphoric about his market prospects and planned to produce up to 20,000 tons of packaging per year. Buying coconut shells and banana stalks from nearby farmers would create a win-win situation, he had hoped, “because this is ag waste they have to discard and now it provides them additional income.”

But his first year exposed the challenges of trying to transform an entrenched system. “The Indian government did not enforce the ban,” he says. “You practically see no difference in India; there is plastic trash everywhere.” Then the pandemic emerged, and with it, a rapid increase in single-use plastics worldwide.

He has reason to believe that Germany will learn from these lapses because the ban has already taken effect there. “The European Union will enforce the new laws!” he says with conviction. “The big chains are urgently looking for alternative packaging.” He aims to produce 3,000 tons of compostable packaging this year, and sell it to food delivery services, food producers and supermarkets. Companies such as Delivery Hero and several food packaging outfits have already invested in his German facility.

Another reason his product did not gain a bigger market share in India is the price: His material is slightly more expensive than plastic, and this will hold true at the new factory, too. “In Europe, a plastic container for vegetables costs about five cents; ours is about six or seven cents.” This makes policy all the more important – for products like Gordillo’s to succeed, single-use plastics must be phased out.

This is the story of an ecological innovation that bears the marks of a true solution: a compostable, upcycled product that is locally sourced and produced with minimal resources. And yet, it is also a lesson about the challenges posed by a bigger problem: As long as the world chooses the cheapest solution, plastic wins. Even though it costs us more in the long run.

This February, nations will come together at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi to discuss a global treaty for plastics. Recognizing that the issue has become as urgent and widespread as the climate crisis, the United Nations will seek to reach an international agreement to limit, for the first time, plastic production worldwide, similar to the Paris Climate Agreement. Joe Biden has signaled his support and seems to see a window of opportunity to tackle the issue. “Our goal is to create a tool that we can use to protect our oceans and all of the life that they sustain from growing global harms of plastic pollution,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Nairobi in November. “It’s crucial that the agreement call on countries to develop and enforce strong national action plans to address this problem at its source.”

Every year, more than eight million tons of plastic end up in the oceans, threatening life around the world, but could biodegradable ‘bioplastic’ offer a solution?

A Chinese research team has found a new method for producing bioplastics made from proteins which are biodegradable and biocompatible as well as being easily processed.

The research was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

There’s a great deal of interest in ‘bioplastics’ but so far, bioplastics based on natural materials like starch, or synthetic biomaterials like polylactic acid, have failed to deliver, showing off inadequate durability, biocompatibility, and/or biodegradability in most cases.

Creating some bioplastics often require complex, energy-intensive processing methods and toxic chemicals.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

A team led by Jingjing Li and Yawei Liu (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, China), as well as Bo Wei (First Medical Center of PLA General Hospital) have created new bioplastics whose properties can be ‘tweaked’ as needed.

The researchers developed two lysine-rich proteins and produced them in bacterial cultures, creating bioplastics which can either be soft or hard.

The team also used wet spinning to produce biofibres that are as strong as some biotechnological spider silks.

The researchers believe it could be possible to make toys with this new, nontoxic bioplastic that can be dyed with food coloring.

This material could also be used to seal wounds, the researchers believe.

Plastic pollution now affects almost all species in the world’s oceans, and is set to quadruple by 2050, a report by wildlife group WWF found last week.

The report found that 88% of marine species, from plankton to whales are affected by contamination.

Pollution hotspots such as the Mediterranean, the East China and Yellow Seas, and the Arctic sea ice are already exceeding dangerous thresholds of microplastics.

The report commissioned by the WWF reviewed 2,590 studies and found that by the end of the century marine areas more than two and a half times the size of Greenland could exceed ecologically dangerous thresholds of microplastic concentration.

The amount of marine microplastic could increase 50-fold by then, the wildlife charity warned.

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

This is based on projections that plastic production is expected to more than double by 2040 resulting in plastic debris in the ocean quadrupling by 2050.

Heike Vesper, director marine programme of WWF Germany, said: “All evidence suggests that plastic contamination of the ocean is irreversible. Once distributed in the ocean, plastic waste is almost impossible to retrieve.

“It steadily degrades and so the concentration of micro- and nanoplastics will continue to increase for decades. Targeting the causes of plastic pollution is far more effective than cleaning up afterwards.

“If governments, industry and society act in unison now, they can still limit the plastic crisis.”

The researchers warn that threatened species could be pushed towards extinction by plastic pollution.

Watch: Big brands call for global pact to stop plastic pollution

You’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about the negative environmental and human health impacts of plastics. And for good reason – its global production is expected to more than triple between now and 2050.

According to industry projections, we will create more plastics in the next 25 years than have been produced in the history of the world so far.

While plastics touch nearly every aspect of the market, they are especially ubiquitous in our buildings. The building and construction industry is the second largest use sector for plastics after packaging. Plastic production relies on a variety of hazardous chemicals and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of the lifecycle. And while there is a lot of talk about recycling, the truth is that virtually no plastic building products are recycled into equal use materials today.

Given this info, we believe the best way to avoid hazardous chemicals and support a circular economy in the building industry is to avoid plastic building materials altogether.

But we also believe in the power of the market to drive innovation. So, let’s consider what would need to happen for plastic building products to be considered truly sustainable. Can the plastics industry do better?

Last October, the Hong Kong government announced a cobbled-together plan to reduce the city’s climate-changing levels of pollution and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. As one prominent feature of that plan, it declared its intent to “regulate disposable plastic tableware in phases from 2025 onwards.” 

While some might understandably see this as embarrassing evidence of the government’s derisory policies on climate change, it at least shows that officials are very slowly waking up to the scourge of plastic that blights the environment.

Perhaps Hong Kong officials were taking a lead from Beijing (as is their reflexive wont nowadays), where the government has declared war on plastic waste, most recently in 2020 when it called for the phaseout of single-use plastics.

It is hard not to applaud a war on plastic, especially now. Plastic waste in China, Hong Kong and the world has jumped during the Covid-19 pandemic as takeaway food in plastic containers has become the mainstay of restaurants and the only choice for many citizens subject to lockdowns.

Additionally, billions of people have adopted the practice of wearing disposable face masks, which in many places have joined plastic bottles and shopping bags as blights on the landscape and the oceans. 

The growth in plastic seems to have no limits; between 1980 and 2015, global production increased more than eightfold. The resulting waste has reached every nook and cranny of the planet, including the deepest seabed, the remotest Arctic ice and the highest mountains.

It has gathered in enormous floating “garbage patches” at sea, insinuating itself into the soils from which our food is grown, and polluted the water that we drink. It is even in the air that we breath. 

Microplastics are now omnipresent in aquatic food chains. Most people in China who eat fish are eating plastic that those fish have consumed. In one study, of the 21 species of sea fish and freshwater fish from Chinese waters examined, all were found to have ingested plastic.

Another study found microplastics to be pervasive in China’s freshwater ecosystems, including the fish there. In short, plastic is absolutely everywhere.

China’s role in the global plastic cataclysm cannot be understated. It consumes one-fifth of the world’s plastic, it is the largest exporter of plastic products, and until 2018 (when an import ban came into effect) it was the largest importer of plastic waste.

It is by a wide margin the world’s largest maker of virgin plastic, accounting for nearly one-third of the global total, and it produces more than three-quarters of the world’s polyphthalamide fibres, which are typically used to make polyester.

Of the 300 million tonnes of plastic produced annually, more than 14 million tonnes find their way into the oceans, explaining why plastic comprises four-fifths of the rubbish found there. China is by far the largest source of mismanaged plastic waste, contributing to it being the largest source of plastic in the oceans. By one estimate, 44 percent of the waste entering the oceans each year comes from China. 

Anyone who has visited a remote Hong Kong beach in summertime (when prevailing winds push toward the coast) can attest to the heaps of plastic rubbish that are deposited there by the tide. (Most south-facing beaches in Hong Kong suffer this affliction, but it may be less evident to infrequent visitors of official beaches due to periodic clean-ups by government contractors.)

A cursory investigation – noting the simplified Chinese script on bottles, jugs, food sachets, bags, medicine containers, and so on – reveals a commonality in that rubbish: most of it hails from mainland China. 

This seasonal migration of plastic from the mainland is but one tiny manifestation of the huge volumes of the stuff that finds its way into Chinese rivers before travelling to the sea and thence to seemingly every corner of the great oceans.

Of all the world’s rivers, the Yangtze is far and away the largest source of ocean plastic – by one account being a vector for more than half of all marine plastic pollution –  disgorging hundreds of thousands of tonnes annuall. Several other rivers in China each launch tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic into the sea each year.

After decades of weak policies, such as an oft-ignored ban on free shopping bags, that failed to prevent growing plastic pollution of China’s land, soil, water and living environments, in 2020 the Chinese government promulgated a series of new laws and regulations to limit plastic waste.

It is too soon to know whether these policies will be able to keep up with growing use and disposal of products made from plastic. Prospects are rather poor.

Even while the government decreed that single-use plastics should be banned, their use was exploding as online food delivery services became popular and as the need for such services skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic.

To be sure, China has policies for sorting and recycling plastic waste from households. However, those policies are far from universally effective, not least because much of the country’s domestic waste comprises unrecyclable plastics, such as wrappers, bags, composite packaging and Styrofoam.

Only about 17 percent of the plastic used in China is recycled in some way.

The myriad projects and policies across China for reducing plastic waste face the same problem as efforts to reduce other forms of pollution in the country – they run up against the party-state’s higher priority of stoking economic growth.

Increasing affluence and consumption create such high demand that the volume of pollution remains persistently immense.

The severity of plastic waste in China was so visible in recent years that it garnered the attention of government censors. The documentary Plastic China, which depicts the squalor of China’s plastic recycling industry, quickly went viral online. Almost as quickly, it was banned.

The film seemed to strike a nerve among Chinese policymakers, to the point where it likely contributed to the government’s decision in 2017 to ban the importation of most plastic waste.

For 25 years up to 2017, nearly half the world’s exports of plastic for recycling went to China (aided in large part by Hong Kong’s central role as a shipping hub for the global waste trade). Consequently, the 2017 import ban – the so-called National Sword decree – created turmoil for the world’s recycling industry. 

The ban was explicitly justified as a measure to protect “China’s environmental interests and people’s health.” The implications for the world’s environment or the health of people in other countries seems not to have been considered.

Much as with other environmental problems that afflict China, in addressing the plastic problem at home, China has effectively ignored its role in contributing to the problem abroad. Through its actions, China has greatly exacerbated the plastic scourge globally. 

Insofar as the import ban may push developed countries to find ways to reduce and reuse their own plastic waste, it has the potential to reduce global plastic pollution. The ban has so far been correlated with a reduction in global exports, and, if this trend holds, may be an impetus for some modest improvements in the reuse, recycling and processing of plastic waste in other countries.

However, at least in the short term, the ban has had the real effect of creating massive surpluses of plastic waste, and thus massive falls in that material’s economic value. Consequently, much of the plastic waste that was once exported to China for reuse has been incinerated or buried in landfills, adding to the adverse environmental impacts.

Another adverse consequence of the import ban was for much of the waste once bound for China, especially low-quality and contaminated materials, to be imported instead by some of the poorest developing countries, mostly those with limited (or no) capacity to prevent the waste from befouling their local environments.

Many of the new plastic-processing factories that sprang up to replace factories in China are in African and Southeast Asian “pollution havens.” 

Those factories, many of which are owned or operated by Chinese corporations, quickly produced the same air, land and water pollution that rightly garnered condemnation in China. With the amount of plastic waste being displaced by China’s import ban expected to reach 110 million tonnes each year by 2030, the potential environmental consequences are calamitous for the poor countries where much of it will be processed.

As possible demonstration that Chinese officials cared relatively little about the import ban’s environmental impact, in 2018 they used it as a weapon during their trade war with the United States, increasing and decreasing enforcement at the border depending on the state of the two countries’ trade relations.

The import ban is no saviour for China. Only about one-tenth of China’s plastic waste was imported before the ban (with Hong Kong being the largest official source by far), meaning that the vast bulk of the problem, both in the form of waste fouling China itself and waste from China reaching the sea, depends upon what happens within China.

It might be tempting to blame exporters of plastic waste for pushing it into China, thus prompting the official ban. But such an interpretation would ignore the reality that that waste was imported by China to feed the demand of Chinese factories in need of plastic feedstock.

Paradoxically, the National Sword ban was made possible by the massive growth in plastic waste being generated within China itself, largely negating the need for imports.

While China has banned imports of plastic waste and started to reign in plastic pollution at home, it remains the leader in producing plastic that finds its way into the global environment. Its behaviour is akin to that of an illicit narcotics dealer who is also an addict. Having decided to curb its own addiction, it continues to profit from feeding the world’s addiction.

Rather than taking responsibility for the full lifecycle of the plastic it produces, China’s policy is to supply global consumers – and to profit from the world’s seemingly insatiable addiction to all things plastic.

Plastic has been in widespread use for only about 75 years. But today’s high-consuming, throwaway culture means that it is one of the most prominent features of the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch in which humanity has shaped the Earth. Later this month, the United Nations Environmental Assembly will likely launch the process of negotiating a legally binding international agreement to limit plastic pollution. That process may take years to complete. The global scourge of plastic looks set to continue for decades at least. 

Centuries in the future, archaeologists will dig through our plastic waste looking for clues to how and why we devastated our planet. Much of that waste will carry a prideful label: “Made in China.”

Last updated on 12:02, 13 February 2022 by Mercedes Hutton.

Tiny fragments of plastic can linger for years in slow flowing streams and rivers, according to the results of a computer modeling study published in Science Advances last month.

As tributaries and rivers flow from source to estuary, through rural, urban and industrial landscapes, they have lots of opportunities to pick up plastic fragments and carry them to the ocean, but we still know relatively little about what happens along the way, how long this turbulent journey might take, or what the environmental impacts may be.

“There are a lot of physical processes that take place in a stream,” said lead author Jennifer Drummond, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Models of microplastic transport that take into account gravitational forces alone predict that very small particles will stay afloat and be carried swiftly to the ocean. But small fragments can also be influenced by the dynamics of water movement at the interface between flowing water and sediment, called the ‘hyporheic’ zone. Plastic particles can be carried downwards from the surface by turbulence, while small variations in pressure can force water into the sediments, depositing microplastics there. These exchanges between flowing water and river sediments are “the piece that was missing,” from previous explanations of microplastic transport, Drummond explained.

The researchers modeled the journey of microplastics released from wastewater treatment into rivers of different sizes and flow rates, focusing on the smallest microplastic fragments — less than 100 microns across, or the width of a single human hair — which are most strongly influenced by pressure differences between the surface water and the hyporheic zone. They found that heretofore ignored hyporheic exchange processes can draw microplastics into the sediments at rate of 5% per kilometer (8% per mile) on average.

“This kind of exchange hadn’t been modeled and accounted for previously, and it seems to be an important one,” said Sherri Mason, Director of Sustainability at Penn State Erie in Pennsylvania, U.S., who was not involved in the study. A deeper understanding of hyporheic processes, “moves us closer to having better global accounting of where all of the plastic is,” she added.

Particles embedded in sediments will remain trapped as long as the river flow stays relatively low, and the model showed that for a 10 kilometer stretch of river, they could spend 30 hours on average, and up to 3 years in the sediments. Slower-moving streams and headwaters captured more microplastics and for longer: 8% of plastic particles entered these river sediments per kilometer and low-flow conditions could keep them there for up to 7 years. This suggests that storms and flood events, which are becoming more severe and more frequent as a result of climate change, could trigger the release of millions of accumulated fragments of microplastic from river sediments.

Remobilized microplastics might end up deposited on flood plains as storm waters retreat or be carried onwards downstream to the ocean. “The time in between [floods] will really determine how much [plastic] is remobilized versus how much can stay and accumulate,” explained Drummond.

The team noted that the rate of microplastic accumulation in the model agreed closely with a published dataset from the Roter Main River in Germany. Sediment cores collected downstream of a wastewater plant there contained between 4,500 and 30,000 plastic fragments smaller than 50 microns across for every kilogram of dried sediment, close to the model’s prediction of 10,000 – 50,000 particles per kilogram.

“This is an important and sophisticated piece of research that helps us understand the processes involved in the accumulation of microplastics on riverbeds,” said Jamie Woodward, professor of physical geography at the University of Manchester in the UK. He praised the study’s focus on microplastics smaller than 100 microns, explaining that “the finest microplastics may pose the most serious ecological risk.”

Finding the missing plastic

Sediment-bound microplastics could be the source of so-called ‘missing plastic’ identified in comparisons of the rate of plastic release from known sources with measurements of microplastic contamination in the oceans. “It’s been postulated that some of that missing plastic is probably in sediments,” said Mason, and this study confirms that hyporheic exchange is a mechanism that can pull very small microplastic fragments into the sediment and hold them there for hours or days.

Even a few hours in the sediment can fundamentally change a plastic particle: chemical processes can start to break them into smaller fragments or convert them into gases, and they can become food or territory for living organisms. “Many different chemicals and microbes can attach to these plastic particles,” explained Drummond, and the smaller the particle, the larger the surface area for microbes and chemicals to attach.

To insects and fishes living in and around the rivers, microbe- and chemical-laden plastic particles can look like an appetizing snack. “The channel bed is a critical part of the riverine ecosystem where many creatures live, feed and reproduce,” said Woodward. “If the riverbed is contaminated with microplastics, there is a high chance that some of those microplastic particles will enter the food chain.”

But how much that might impact wildlife or people is uncertain. Much of our understanding of how microplastics affect living organisms comes from laboratory studies of virgin plastic that hasn’t undergone these chemical and biological changes. “By the time they reach the ocean, [the plastic particles] are different,” said Drummond, and “it’s these environmentally transformed plastics,” that are lingering in freshwater ecosystems and eventually being carried to the ocean, posing an unknown risk to freshwater and marine biodiversity.

Headwaters are often in more remote, high biodiversity regions, but their slow-flowing waters are more likely to drive microplastics into the sediment and keep them there for longer. This means “there’s more time for these particles to really incorporate into the environmental matrix,” said Drummond, with potential knock-on effects for the entire food chain.

“The quality of the riverbed environment affects the whole riverine ecosystem,” remarked Woodward. “The longer these particles are stored in this environment, the greater the risk.”

Plastic pollution has helped push us over a planetary boundary

Globally, our indulgent use and disposal of plastics has now exceeded safe levels, helping to push us past a planetary boundary for chemical pollution and potentially setting the Earth life support system on a path towards a new, less habitable state.

In addition, it’s believed that overshooting one planetary boundary can destabilize another, like a line of falling dominoes: Escalating climate change — an already infringed planetary boundary — is bringing with it more severe and frequent extreme weather events, which could have complex effects on microplastic transport and retention in rivers. More intense and frequent droughts will reduce stream flows, depositing more microplastic fragments into sediments where they can make their way into the food chain, with potentially unforeseen consequences for the biodiversity planetary boundary. Conversely, increasingly common and severe storms and floods can remobilize those trapped fragments — and any microbes or chemicals attached to their surface — allowing them to be carried to the ocean, where they may impact marine life.

Sediment-trapped microplastics will continue to extend the lag between environmental contamination in rivers and release of pollutants into the ocean, which could slow clean-up efforts. “If we were to stop all plastic production today, how much longer are we going to be seeing this stuff leaching into the environment?” Mason questioned. “There’s always a delayed reaction when it comes to the environment.”

“It really makes you think,” said Drummond, “Every time you’re using plastic, it very likely ends up in your rivers and it’ll be there for a very, very long time.”

Citation:

Drummond, J. D., Schneidewind, U., Li, A., Hoellein, T. J., Krause, S., & Packman, A. I. (2022). Microplastic accumulation in riverbed sediment via hyporheic exchange from headwaters to mainstems. Science advances, 8(2), eabi9305. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi9305.

Banner image: Plastic waste has become ubiquitous in the global environment since the years following World War II. Photo credit: Ivan Radic on VisualHunt.com

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In October 2021, a Belgian environmental inspector opened a container at the port of Antwerp that, according to its manifest, was supposed to contain bales of mixed paper waste from Canada.

It was one of 20 containers from the Saint-Michel recycling centre in Montreal that were destined for India.

“Oh it really stinks!” said Marc de Strooper, taken aback by the stench of garbage.

As he looked closer, de Strooper found a mess of broken glass, old clothes, metal debris, broken toys and used medical masks. He also saw paper bales that contained a large quantity of difficult-to-recycle plastic bags.

“Canada is known as a beautiful country with lots of nature lovers. I don’t understand how they can produce garbage like this,” de Strooper said. He stopped the containers from moving on to their destination and they still sit at the port.

Canada has become one of the biggest exporters of recyclable paper to India — with Quebec and the city of Montreal sending much of their mixed paper waste to that country.

An investigation by Radio-Canada’s Enquête shows that much of what is supposed to be paper actually contains tonnes of plastic bags, some of which litter the Indian landscape, and are often burned as a source of fuel.

Rules around the international plastic waste trade were tightened a few years after China closed its borders to most foreign recycling in 2018.

That waste then flooded countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. It caused a series of scandals and those nations severely restricted plastic imports.

Canadian companies still export large amounts of mixed paper that are often contaminated with plastic. Some appear to ignore international plastic restrictions — with few penalties when they are caught.

Over the last five years, 123 paper-and-plastic bales were returned to Canada because they did not meet standards, yet the federal government has only issued six warning letters.

India, with lax inspection in some of its ports and a huge appetite for paper fibre, has become an attractive destination for Canadian recycling, with roughly 500,000 tonnes of mixed paper bales exported there between April 2019 and 2021.

By law, these bales can include junk mail, office paper and paperboard packaging. Although Indian rules say they can have only two per cent contamination, some of the bales entering are stuffed with large amounts of hard-to-recycle plastic.

The city of Montreal is considered among the worst offenders when it comes to shipping off contaminated bales of paper.

The city’s two recycling centers — in Lachine and Saint-Michel — average between 20 and 26 percent contamination, according to numbers provided by the city.

“If you have 25 percent of a bale’s mass that is not paper, there were major defects when the bale was collected,” said Marc Olivier, a professor in management of residual materials at a Quebec research centre, the Centre de transfert technologique en écologie industrielle in Sorel-Tracy, Que.

According to de Strooper, this paper should not be classified as recyclable, but rather as mixed waste or hard-to-recycle plastic, the import of which is prohibited in countries like India without their prior consent. He has formally requested that the Italian-based paper dealer send the shipment back to Canada.

“What will they do with the non paper waste (in India), could it end up being dumped or burned out in the open?” De Strooper said.

Using Indian export-import databases, Radio-Canada followed paper shipments to see where some of the thousands of containers sent from Canada to India ended up.

WATCH | How so much soft plastic makes its way to India from Montreal:

Where some contaminants in Quebec’s paper recycling end up

23 hours ago

Duration 2:56

Mixed in with the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of paper sent to India are soft plastics. Local residents say the plastic is burned as a source of fuel by industries in the surrounding area. 2:56

The search led the Enquête team three hours north of the capital Delhi, to the city of Muzaffarnagar. On its outskirts are 30 paper mills, many of which use subcontractors to sort plastic in the open air.

In the five sorting areas visited, the journalists found easily recognized Canadian and Quebec packaging and bags including Publi-sacs, President’s Choice, Indigo, Québon, Métro, and Cashmere toilet paper.

Mostly female, low-caste workers earning just over three dollars a day for sorting the plastic described their work.

“If you can get used to it, it’s fine,” said one of the workers. But off-camera, the sorters said the work is gruelling and the salary insufficient to support their families.

The plastic comes to them from local paper factories where it is separated and sent for further sorting. The hard plastic — drink bottles, containers and and food packages — are sent for recycling.

Local villagers say the soft plastic is burned secretly at night by the paper mills or plants that make jaggery, a form of sugar. The plastic, they say, is a much cheaper fuel source of energy than wood.

“It costs next to nothing,” said local farmer and finance worker Rahul Kumar, from the nearby village of Chandpur. “One or two rupees per kilo [of plastic], while wood costs 30 to 40 rupees more.”

With a group of friends, Kumar, whose land lies close to several mills, began to identify the diseases that they suspect are linked to this pollution. They collected the medical records of people who had respiratory problems, asthma, skin diseases and cancers.

In an email, the Muzaffarnagar Pollution Control Board confirmed it has imposed fines for the illegal storage of plastic and open burning on several industries.

On the other hand, it said that only one paper manufacturer has been fined since 2019 for burning plastic. However, from official documents and media reports, Radio-Canada found at least two other instances where local officials intervened to stop paper mills from burning plastic.

At the base of a hill used by one of the paper mills to dump its ashes, Radio-Canada also found burnt plastic debris.

A 2019 report by the Center for Ganga River Basin Management and Studies cites the burning of plastic as a major malpractice in the paper industry.

Industry officials insist though that the plastic is disposed of properly.

“We give our plastic to the cement works,” said Pankajj Agarwaal, the representative of the Association of Paper Manufacturers in the region. “It is burned in good environmental conditions. It doesn’t cause any problems.”

Experts acknowledge that plastic is burned under more controlled conditions in cement plants, however the practice remains controversial due to its environmental impact.

A world away

Meanwhile, Ricova, the company that runs Montreal’s two recycling plants, says that it cannot control what happens in India. It also says that its partners treat plastic responsibly.

“The regulations are not as strong there as they are here,” says Dominic Colubriale, president of Ricova. “It may be that people may make a mess in certain places…[but] I think we do business with people who are responsible.”

“I know that part of the plastic is burned but it is done legally [and used as fuel] in cement plants,” Colubriale said.

Colubriale also says that the material he sends overseas is relatively clean and that customers tell the company there is less contamination than the city of Montreal has reported.

“I think there may be something wrong in how they are doing their evaluations,” Colubriale said of the Montreal reports.

But Montreal points out that it was Ricova that picked the firm that analyzes the quality of the materials that come out of the Saint-Michel recycling plant and evaluates the level of contamination.

A problematic sorting plant

“We know that Saint-Michel has technological challenges,” says Marie-Andrée Mauger, a Montreal borough mayor who sits on its executive committee.

The city also points out that Ricova only took possession of the old center of Saint-Michel in 2020, when it bought the assets of the previous operator, which had gone bankrupt.

In November 2021, Ricova installed new equipment in hopes of lowering levels of contamination for mixed paper. Mauger says the city now expects better performance from the sorting center.

But the more modern sorting center in Lachine which opened in 2019, has a similarly high contamination rate averaging 20 percent. Ricova attributes this poor performance to faulty sorting equipment. The company filed a lawsuit in 2021 against the manufacturer, asking for $5.5 million to buy new machinery.

Mauger also says that the city does not have any way of tracing where the paper ends up when it is sold.

She was unaware that India’s legal limit for paper contamination was two per cent and that Montreal was sending paper with over 10 times that level of contamination.

Both the federal and provincial governments say that reforms they have introduced will eventually reduce plastic consumption at the consumer level, but that won’t happen until 2025.

In the meantime Marc De Strooper continues his fight against dirty Canadian recycling.

“It breaks my heart but all I can do is send the cargo back to Canada.”

If a scientific opinion recently proposed by European officials is upheld, the recommended daily dose of bisphenol-A, or BPA, in Europe will be more than a million-fold lower than what U.S. regulators say is safe.

And the change in accepted exposure would all but ensure the chemical cannot be used in any food contact products.

“There’s nothing different about the physiology of an American compared to a European,” Laura Vandenberg, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health & Health Sciences, told EHN. “So, if it’s hazardous in Europe, it’s hazardous for us.”

A significant gap already existed between the European Union and the U.S. in what regulators considered a safe dose of the plastic additive commonly used in everything from can linings to plastic water bottles. The draft opinion, released in December by the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA, is “just moving it all the way to the left,” said Vandenberg. She added that their conclusion is “very solidly backed up by science,” and, in fact, has been now for at least a decade.

“And it’s really different compared to the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration],” she said.

BPA is an endocrine disruptor, meaning it alters the proper functioning of our hormones, and is linked to a host of health problems, including cancer, diabetes, obesity, reproductive, nervous and immune system impacts, and behavioral problems. Scientists like Vandenberg have published studies on such health effects for decades.

So, that begs the question: How can two major regulatory bodies look at the science and come to such vastly different conclusions? Where is the disconnect?