At the end of February, the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) will tackle a challenging task: the creation of a landmark treaty to control plastic pollution worldwide. While most nations have agreed to participate, the scope and timing of such an agreement aren’t settled, with many countries, environmental NGOs, and the plastics industry expressing widely different ideas as to what should be included.

But with media images rife of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and of the world’s most remote seaside beaches drowning in waste, just about everyone agrees it’s time to act: “The ever-increasing growth in the amount of plastics produced has led to a significant plastic waste generation [problem] that has outpaced society’s ability to manage it effectively,” a U.N. baseline report warned in 2020.

Tallying all sources, “Worldwide, at least 8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the world’s oceans each year — the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the sea every minute,” concluded a key report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released in December. In 2016, the U.S. generated more plastic waste than any other country, exceeding that of all European Union (EU) member states combined, the report stated.

The U.S. Congress commissioned that NAS study, which suggested that the United States establish a national strategy to cope with plastic waste by the end of 2022, with an assessment of progress by the end of 2025. The U.S. currently lags behind the EU and Canada in setting plastic environmental guidelines, acknowledges Margaret Spring, who chaired the academy committee that produced the report. China banned plastic waste imports in 2018 and set a plan to phase out certain plastics by 2025.

While the NAS study relied on U.S. federal data to reach its conclusions and focused on oceans, its experts agree that the plastics problem extends well beyond Earth’s seas, and that any initiative aimed at controlling plastic waste must be based on a global methodology and cooperation in order to succeed.

Figures differ as to which nations pollute the most with plastics, depending on whether production or use is counted, or whether the EU is considered as one entity. China, for instance, accounts for about 30% of plastic production, but only about 20% of global use. Globally, most plastics are manufactured and used in China, Western Europe and the U.S.

“This [NAS] report synthesizes what knowledgeable people already knew,” Spring said. She added: “What haven’t been set [to date] are global goals,” something that a U.N. plastics treaty should address.

A runaway plastics crisis

Estimates vary, but U.N. figures assert that humanity uses 500 billion plastic bags and 17 million plastic oil barrels annually. Some 13 million metric tons of plastic wind up in the oceans every year, and plastic kills 100,000 marine animals annually.

Another U.N. report, released in October, warned that “plastic production has risen exponentially in the last decades. It now amounts to some 400 million tonnes per year. Yet only an estimated 12% of plastics produced have been incinerated and only an estimated 9% have been recycled. The remainder has either been disposed of in landfills or released into the environment, including the oceans. Without meaningful action, flows of plastic waste into aquatic ecosystems are expected to nearly triple from around 11 million tonnes in 2016 to around 29 million tonnes in 2040.”

According to a 2019 report from the Center for International Environmental Law, all this plastic is also contributing heavily to climate change. “At current levels, greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C [2.7°F]. With the petrochemical and plastic industries planning a massive expansion in production, the problem is on track to get much worse,” says the report.

Nations aside, it’s hard to know which of the world’s companies generate the most discarded plastic. Break Free from Plastic (BFP), an NGO and self-described “global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution,” releases an annual estimate based on pieces of trash volunteers collect that can be identified with a specific company. By that measure, junk food packaging is a huge part of the problem, with top polluters at last count being Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever, Nestlé, and Proctor & Gamble.

But the BFP estimate — even though it accounts for brand-name trash in 45 countries — is clearly just that, as it only tallies identifiable garbage that can be found, not what ends up in landfills, incinerators, or bodies of water, such as monofilament and bits of fishing nets. Nor do the rankings consider plastic manufacturers. (Full disclosure: This story’s author holds retirement account stock in the Coca-Cola Company.)

Discarded plastic, ranging from food containers to fishing gear, is washing up on shores around the globe, getting eaten by marine life, interfering with navigation, and dissolving into microplastic waste that works its way up the food chain and even into the atmosphere where it may be influencing climate change.

“Plastic pollution can now be found everywhere, from the remote shores of the Arctic to the deepest parts of the ocean. Up to 12 million tonnes of plastic leak into the marine environment annually, harming biodiversity and posing a threat to food security, sustainability and human health,” the Environmental Investigation Agency reported in 2020.

A U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) report issued last October cited the urgent need for a waste treaty. “Plastics are the largest, most harmful and most persistent fraction of marine litter, accounting for at least 85% of total marine waste,” it noted, adding that, “while we have the know-how [to dispose of plastics properly], we need the political will and urgent action by government to tackle the mounting crisis.”

Challenging negotiations ahead

The UNEA, founded in 2014, meets biennially in Nairobi, Kenya. At previous UNEA assemblies, delegates debated the need for an international plastics agreement but couldn’t agree on a way forward. But international momentum got a big boost in 2019 when the Nordic Council — an association of parliaments from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland, an autonomous region in Finland — called for creating such an agreement.

As a result, featured prominently on the docket for this year’s assembly, slated to run from Feb. 28 to March 2, is the development of a framework for the world’s first ever plastics treaty. The assembly will focus especially on what should be included — and not included.

Past negotiated U.N. environmental treaties cover everything from transboundary air pollution to international transport of hazardous waste (including plastics) and industrial accidents — but they may not provide much groundwork for the plastics treaty process. “None of the existing treaties, each of which has its own specific focus, is a suitable basis for the comprehensive discussions which are necessary to contain and combat the plastic soup,” according to the Plastic Soup Foundation, an Amsterdam-based NGO dedicated to keeping the world’s waters free of plastic.

The UNEA will be considering two competing drafts to arrive at a framework. A more comprehensive one, sponsored by Rwanda and Peru, would try to cope with plastics pollution worldwide from production to disposal. The other, sponsored by Japan, focuses narrowly on oceans and end-of-use.

As representatives of the world’s nations gather this month, plastic manufacturers and oil companies (which provide the petroleum-based raw materials to make plastics), will be taking an interest and want to participate in hopes of influencing outcomes.

The plastics industry seems willing to support an accord — so long as it doesn’t interfere too much with business. The Washington, D.C.-based Plastics Industry Association gave Mongabay a statement reading in part: “We support international cooperation to eliminate plastic leakage into the environment. We encourage solutions that are flexible and relevant to regional context and treat the plastics industry as experts and partners. We caution against heavy-handed restrictions that impede the ability of materials to flow around the world, especially in a time of stressed supply chains. Furthermore, we believe that production or consumption limits on plastics is the wrong approach and would encourage the use of products that are inferior from a performance or sustainability profile and result in major economic harm globally.”

Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a lobbying group that represents plastic manufacturers, also provided Mongabay with a statement, writing that “ACC fully supports the negotiation of a treaty to eliminate plastic waste and accelerate the transition to a more circular economy.” Last September, ACC, along with the International Council of Chemical Associations and the World Plastics Council, agreed on a series of principles for an agreement, including national “flexibility and support” to meet individual nations’ needs, improve “access to waste collection,” and innovate design and recycling.

ACC got part of its wish in December 2020 when the U.S. Congress passed the Save Our Seas Act 2.0, a follow-up on legislation passed in 2018 to protect oceans from plastic waste. Corporations didn’t oppose the bill and President Donald Trump signed it, as it didn’t regulate industry but merely called for more government-sponsored research into recycling, reuse, and making less hazardous products. (Not surprisingly, industry was glad to let the government pay for research rather than spend its own money for that purpose.)

Congress, meanwhile, has not acted on the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act introduced in the current and previous legislative sessions. That bill would put limits on single-use plastic production and add requirements for reuse and recycling.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) suggested in 2020 that a “UN treaty on plastic pollution would benefit businesses as well as the environment. It can create a level playing field across the plastic value chain,” largely by standardizing compliance costs and activities, the NGO suggested.

The parties prepare

The European Union and 48 countries signed on to an agreement at a ministerial conference last September endorsing the need for a plastics control treaty, stating: “no country can adequately address the various aspects of this challenge alone; hence there is a need to commit to establishing a balanced framework for international cooperation that includes coordinated actions to address the negative impacts of plastic along its life cycle, [and] taking into account local and national circumstances as well as specific needs of developing countries.” At last count, 81 nations have signed on including the U.K. and all EU members, but not the U.S. or China. And according to the WWF Global Plastic Navigator, 161 countries have expressed interest.

Though the U.S. hasn’t signed this U.N. document, the administration of President Joe Biden has agreed to participate in the treaty creation, reversing the Trump administration’s position. (Before the change in presidents, the U.S., one of the biggest plastics polluters, was one of the few countries to actively oppose regulation, which helped set back the international negotiating process.)

One reason for Biden’s delayed signature, and the administration’s failure as of mid-January 2022 to articulate a global plastics control policy: it’s complicated. Twelve federal agencies play a role in determining the U.S. position, ranging from the State Department to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The State Department said in a statement to Mongabay that it “is premature to discuss” matters such as the U.S. position on enforcement, or the degree to which an accord should focus on ocean or all plastic pollution. But the statement indicated the U.S. wants some flexibility, saying “We need to be innovative and account for different national circumstances” and “ensure that countries most in need have the financial resources to implement potential solutions.”

The State Department says it is reviewing NAS findings and recommendations, while also indicating that it wants the agreement to consider all aspects of the plastic lifecycle, noting that it wants countries to consider “circular economy approaches that reduce the lifecycle impacts of plastic” and that some nations “may include restrictions on plastic production and consumption.”

In a January blog post, Monica Medina, assistant secretary for the department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, listed her four priorities for that bureau, including “seeking global solutions to address the onslaught of plastic pollution that spills into our waterways and oceans and harms biodiversity.”

Many international environmental groups are pushing hard for a tough U.S. stance. “We’ve been convincing hundreds of governments, corporations, NGOs and other stakeholders to try to move the conversation forward,” said John Hocevar, oceans campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “We’ve also been putting a little bit of public pressure on the Biden Administration to get it to campaign about the global threat.

“We need corporations to take responsibility for what they sell and produce and [make] a shift away from single use plastic and a move to reuse,” Hocevar said. “Governments have not done their job to regulate corporations.”

Whatever the UNEA decides in the coming months, “one good thing about the treaty is that it’s a wake-up call for corporations and governments. They all can see the change that is coming. It should prompt them to start taking action now. There’s no reason to wait until we have a treaty adopted to begin working on solutions,” Hocevar said.

Hard work ahead

What can we expect of the upcoming U.N. session? What comes after? The immediate goal will be the formation of an intergovernmental negotiating committee to develop a treaty draft.

“I am confident that member states will decide on the path forward that makes a real difference,” UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said in a statement to Mongabay. The goal, she says, is to finalize the treaty language at the next UNEA general session in 2024. “This would make for a highly ambitious timeframe, reflecting member states’ understanding of the urgency to make progress on this critical environmental challenge.”

Andersen says member states will still need to hash out the degree to which the treaty will focus on oceans or worldwide dumping and how to finance the agreement. But she contends it will need to cover the entire plastic lifecycle “from production through disposal and reduction of the leakage of existing plastic currently in the global ecosystem.”

Asked about the risk that nations may underestimate their disposal, she replied, “This is an important issue for member states to deliberate further on.” Nations have expressed “reporting fatigue” on other multilateral environmental agreements, “and this is something we do need to seriously keep in mind as we assess the optimum review process.”

Existing international agreements can provide some guidance on matters of enforcement and reporting. But the accord should emphasize convincing nations that their best interests revolve around “a new global plastics circular economy” and switch the emphasis “from enforcement to creating an enabling environment where it is in everyone’s interests to implement the agreement,” Andersen said.

The U.S. and other countries seem intent on the need to act fast and decisively. The State Department, writing to Mongabay, said: “This is an urgent issue that needs urgent attention. We cannot spend years negotiating. We support establishing an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee at UNEA 5.2 [the upcoming February-March meeting], and concluding the negotiations by 2024, which may be in line with the yet to be scheduled UNEA 6 target in both current proposed [Japan and Peru/Rwanda] resolutions.” Time is of the essence, as the tide of global plastics pollution rises ever higher.

Banner image: Some 13 million metric tons of plastic wind up in the oceans every year, and plastic kills 100,000 marine animals annually. Image by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash.

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Cape Fear River Watch is launching a new project to cut down on the amount of litter getting into the Atlantic Ocean.

The nonprofit organization has purchased catch basins that are set to be installed in a handful of storm drains in Wilmington and Leland, the town that sits west across the Cape Fear River, to intercept litter from getting into the river.

The “80% Project” — a title referencing estimates that 80% of marine litter comes from land-based sources — will study the effectiveness of LittaTraps, catch basins designed by a New Zealand-based company called Enviropod.

Cape Fear River Watch received a grant of a little more than $9,500 to purchase four of the mesh, basket-like traps, which are designed to sit inside stormwater drains. The grant, funded by the Jandy Ammons Foundation, will also cover the cost of signage that will be placed at the drains where the traps are installed.

The traps capture trash and other debris carried by stormwater from getting into a drainage system.

Robb Clark, Cape Fear River Watch’s water quality programs manager, is overseeing the project, which entails tracking for one year what kind of trash and how much of it is captured by the traps.

The traps are to be emptied weekly, and trash and debris, such as leaves and other yard debris, captured at each drain will be sorted and then weighed.

Clark said that by tracking by weight the amount of trash collected from the LittaTraps, the organization will have reliable data on how much trash is being caught before it enters the river and, ultimately, the ocean. That information could turn out to be a major selling point to municipalities to budget for future investment in additional traps.

Officials in Wilmington and Leland have agreed to install traps in two storm drains. The city and town determine in which drains to place the traps, which are to be maintained by Cape Fear River Watch for one year.

Adrianna Weber, Leland’s town engineer, said in an email that if the traps are a success, “the Town will absolutely look into continuing the use of these devices and similar technologies.”

“We want to keep our community and the waterways in and surrounding our community safe and clean,” she said in the email. “LittaTraps are just one way to help accomplish this goal for our residents and the natural habitats around Leland. The Town regularly checks and cleans stormwater catch basins; therefore, the maintenance of the LittaTraps would align well with our current maintenance operations.”

Leland partners with Cape Fear River Watch to host two stream cleanups each year.

“Anywhere there are public roads and rights-of-way there is always the possibility of trash accumulating over time, but fortunately, the Town does not currently have any major issues with trash and litter,” Weber said. “Maintaining clean roadways, waterways, and public areas is important to the Town and something we maintain focus on through programs like our regular street sweeping and stream clean-ups.”

During a March 27, 2021, cleanup along Mill Creek in the Surgeon Creek watershed, about 140 pounds of bagged trash, about 70 pounds of recycling, and 100 to 150 pounds of miscellaneous trash was collected, including a flat-screen television, car seats, cushions and a large pallet, according to a report provided by Weber.

In May, about 130 pounds of bagged trash, 20 pounds of recycling and 150 to 200 pounds of miscellaneous trash, including wood, shingles, metal car parts and furniture, were picked up along Navassa Road near the creek.

Last year, more than 7,000 pounds of trash was collected from monthly litter sweeps hosted by Cape Fear River Watch, Clark said.

“The vast majority of litter that we find in our watersheds is plastic of some kind,” he said. “Cleanups alone are a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. I could do cleanups every day and we would still be behind. You need structural solutions like this to intercept litter that the cleanups are just not going to be able to get.”

LittaTrap’s mesh basket is designed to capture and retain 100% of plastics and “other gross solids over 5mm,” according to Enviropod’s website.

Plastics in the ocean are a global problem.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an organization made up of more than 1,400 government and civil society organizations, at least 14 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean each year.

Clark said he isn’t aware of municipalities on the East Coast using LittaTraps, but there are communities on the California coast that do.

In 2020, the California State Water Board certified Enviropod’s LittaTrap FC, or full capture, basin insert as a full capture device for trash treatment control.

The traps are available in three standard sizes to fit various catch basin structures. Custom designs and filter liners designed to capture different pollutants are also available.

Cape Fear River Watch will likely purchase liners designed to capture generic litter, such as plastic bottles and bags, Clark said.

Liners must be replaced every three to five years and cost about $30 each.

“As for the maintenance itself, they only recommend you need to go into them quarterly,” Clark said. “That’s not a lot of labor and time input. It’s very hands off. They’re designed to hold up to 600 pounds of litter or debris.”

Clark said he hopes the traps will be installed some time in February.

“Wilmington has a pretty massive (litter) issue,” he said. “I anticipate that to increase year after year based on the way Wilmington’s population is increasing. It’s important to keep these things out of the river. We get our drinking water from the Cape Fear River.”

Tired of cigarette butts littering their streets, one Swedish city is handing over the solution to the birds.

A startup company in the city of Södertälje, near Stockholm, has designed a machine that will feed crows a little bit of food for every cigarette butt they bring back and deposit in the device.

The company, Corvid Cleaning, believes their device could help save the city money when it comes to cleaning up the unsightly refuse.

In fact, founder Christian Günther-Hanssen told The Guardian he expects that crows could cut the city’s butt removal budget by 75 per cent.

The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation says the city of Södertälje spends about $2.7-million on street cleaning per year, and that more than one billion cigarette butts are flicked onto Sweden’s streets annually.

Günther-Hanssen told Swedish online news site The Local that he only uses wild birds for his business and that any participating crows are “taking part on a voluntary basis.”

He said because crows are so intelligent, they can be trained quite quickly using a step-by-step method.

“They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other. At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish,” he said.

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Plastic pollution causes damage akin to climate change, report shows

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Sweden isn’t the first country to attempt the crows-as-sanitation-workers scheme.

In 2018, six crows were trained to pick up cigarette butts at a theme park in France. Rather than the crows being brought in as permanent employees, though, it was part of a larger educational campaign to prompt humans to throw their butts in the trash.

However, the president of the theme park, Nicolas de Villiers, told the New York Times that they had to be careful with how much they made the crows work.

“They don’t play the game if they work too much,” he said, explaining that the birds are clever and need to have mental stimulation and puzzles to solve, in order to thrive.

A 2017 Dutch campaign, called “Crowbar,” also attempted to train crows to pick up cigarette butts for a food reward, but officials decided to end the project in 2018 when they concluded that they “couldn’t get a clear picture of what the effects would be on the crows and the environment.”

Cigarette butts are among the most common forms of human-made pollution worldwide.

Nearly two-thirds of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes made each year are dumped irresponsibly, according to advocates with the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project. Many of those cigarette butts end up in the world’s waterways.

The success of Corvid Cleaning’s ambitious pilot project in the long-term will come down to financing, Tomas Thernström, a waste strategist at Södertälje municipality, told The Guardian.

“It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. That’s an interesting thought,” he said.

– with a file from Josh K. Elliott

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Cigarette butts most common litter on Canadians shores

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Plastics have been a major driver of human progress over the last century. This diverse group of materials has evolved to underpin our modern world with numerous applications that make our daily lives more comfortable.

Our intensive reliance on plastic has created an Age of Disposables — turning this essential material into a scourge of modern society. Over 9 billion tons of plastic have been produced since 1950, with more than half ending up in landfills or polluting ecosystems around the world. Less than 7 percent of plastics produced over the last seven decades have been recycled. Of that number, more than two-thirds ultimately ends up incinerated or as waste.

The problem of plastic pollution is particularly acute in Southeast Asia, with our extensive coastlines and rich yet vulnerable biodiversity. Nations of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia) account for five of the top 10 global producers of ocean plastic debris.

Imagine this: you worm out of your winter sleeping bag, brush off frozen condensation, and pull on a thin baselayer—which instantly warms your skin by 18 degrees. For sticky summer days, you’ve got a different solution: a shirt that leaves your body four degrees cooler than even the lightest wicking tee.

Sound like wishful thinking? It’s not. It’s real tech, and it’s here.

Behind these wonder fabrics is the lab of Dr. Yi Cui, the Harvard-educated, Stanford-employed materials science and engineering researcher who first conceived of the idea. Not for outdoor use, mind you, but for a much more noble cause: to forestall the climate crisis.

The idea came to him in 2014. That year, the U.S. Department of Energy released an EPA study reporting that most people spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors—and subsequently realized that the American electrical grid could crash under that kind of dependence, especially as global temperatures continue to rise. The DOE started offering grants to anyone who could find a solution.

Cui read the report, and immediately had an idea: instead of making the electrical grid or HVAC systems more efficient, why not address the problem at a more fundamental level?

“I thought, ‘Why don’t we make our textiles better?’” he says. “If your clothes keep you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, you can turn down your [thermostat] and save a lot of energy.” Clothing, he figured, could be a grassroots solution to saving the world.

Cui applied for a grant, won it, and went on to patent his new fabric technology. After the three-year grant was up, he brought the project to Meng Sui, a chemist and nanotechnology expert who’s now the CEO of technology incubator EEnotech.

“She helped build the initial team of scientists and engineers who turned the technology into a commercial prototype,” Cui explains. Ultimately, the lab ended up with 11 patents.

So how exactly can fabric get that techy? Buckle in.

When you’re standing still, up to 60 percent of your body heat is emitted in the form of infrared radiation (IR). Most fabrics absorb a good deal of that IR, which is one of the reasons it’s hard to stay cool on hot days even with the thinnest of T-shirts on.

LifeLabs’ cooling fabric, called “CoolLife,” is woven from polyethylene (PE), the same stuff plastic grocery bags are made of. LifeLabs claims it’s the only known textile that’s “thermally transparent,” thanks to a unique chemical bonding structure that doesn’t absorb IR. This means that way more body heat can pass straight through the fabric without getting trapped close to your skin. In contrast, most other activewear fabrics rely on large pores or a mesh-like weave, which only let a fraction of infrared radiation escape.

Incidentally, if you’ve used a filmy plastic produce bag, you know PE is not only thermally transparent but visually transparent. This was Cui’s first hurdle, seeing as he wasn’t trying to get into the lingerie business. So, he invented “nanoporous PE,” a yarn whose plasticky threads are filled with little bubbles, like privacy glass.

The brand’s other fabric, called “WarmLife,” is a little different. The threads are made of recycled polyester rather than PE, and coated with a thin layer of aluminum nanoparticles. Plenty of other companies have used aluminum reflective technology before—like Rab, with its Mythic Ultra 360 sleeping bag, or Columbia, with its line of Omni-Heat jackets. But these technologies use dots or laminated patterns, which aren’t breathable and can only cover a small surface area without feeling clammy Thus, they only trap a small amount of IR radiation. (In lab testing, wearers reported very little difference in warmth when they wore plain cotton shirts versus shirts with traditional reflective coatings.)

But with LifeLabs’ patented take, aerosolizing nozzles spray aluminum nanoparticles directly onto the garment, achieving nearly 100-percent coverage while maintaining breathability. The coating, which is permanently embedded in the textile, reflects 90 percent of the body’s infrared output back toward the wearer. It’s supposedly very effective: a WarmLife shirt retains just as much heat as a comparable layer three times as thick. The upshot? In theory, a baselayer with the same warmth as a sweater.

Think about it. In the winter, 10 to 15 percent of extra metabolic energy expenditure comes from moving around in thick clothing. With WarmLife fabric, your snowshoeing or ski-touring tights might be as warm as thick fleece leggings. Your midlayer, once a synthetic-filled puffy, could just be a long-sleeved tee. With way less bulk and weight, you could go further, faster. Without cumbersome layers to fuss with, it could be possible for dabblers and first-timers to stay more comfortable in colder temps.

CoolLife, on the other hand, offers slightly more modest benefits, which makes sense given that it’s a lot easier to keep a heat-producing body warm than it is to cool it down. But four degrees of cooling could mean the difference between going for that trail run when you might have otherwise picked the treadmill. Or pushing yourself harder on that hike without worrying so much about overheating. And, of course, there’s the thermostat thing—setting your thermostat at 66 degrees Fahrenheit versus 70 degrees Fahrenheit makes a big difference in energy savings.

All of this was promising enough to lure Scott Mellin, then VP of mountain sports at The North Face, to helm the LifeLabs team. At the time, Mellin had nearly 35 years of a storied outdoor industry career behind him and had a pretty good gig. But this was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“When I understood what this was, I had a discussion with my wife,” Mellin says. “I told her, ‘This feels like a once-in-a-100-year opportunity. This is a chance to really reinvent apparel.’”

Needless to say, he took the job.

When all this was initially pitched to me by an especially glib PR guy, I was skeptical. I’ve been testing and writing about gear for the better part of a decade, and I’ve heard countless claims about supposed fabric-science breakthroughs. I can’t name one that lived up to the hype.

So, I accepted a sample of a CoolLife long-sleeve with low expectations. It looked like any other wicking synthetic tee, but I did notice almost immediately that it felt different—sort of like touching the cool side of a pillow.

For two weeks, I wore my sample while traveling through Russia and training with the Russian national ice-climbing team for a story. I wore it to work out, chase metros and trains, and climb long, overhung routes at an outdoor climbing wall in Kirov in full sun—only to find that during it all, the shirt remained cool to the touch.

At home in Colorado, I’ve taken it hiking and trail running. I’m a pretty sweaty person, and this is the first time in my life I’ve been able to charge a trail in 75-degree weather in a long-sleeved shirt without feeling the need to rip it off.

The shirt’s not perfect—it isn’t very stretchy, and the cut makes it look like the uniform pajamas of some kind of hip boarding school. But the performance perks are hard to argue. Like polyester, PE is wicking and quick to dry (I found my back sweat evaporated after just ten minutes in the shade, albeit in Colorado’s drier climate). But unlike polyester, it’s waterproof, has better UPF protection, and doesn’t seem to retain stink despite the fact that there’s no specific anti-odor treatment. Even after wearing it for three weeks of international travel without washing it, my shirt didn’t take on odor.

OK, now ignore all this technological promise for a second. In a world where clothing is thrown out to the tune of about 80 pounds per person per year, do we need to be making more new products?

Nicole Bassett, co-founder of the Renewal Workshop, has asked herself that same question. Once a sustainability director for prAna and a social responsibility manager for Patagonia, Basset partners with brands to refurbish and resell used clothing to keep it out of landfills.

“I spent my whole career looking for more sustainable materials and reducing the impact of the things we make. But the reality of the question here is: Do we have enough things?” Basset says. “After all, 60 percent of the environmental impact of a product is just in making it.”

Products woven from natural, renewable fibers like wool or organic cotton are no exception. Both require huge water and energy inputs to make. Besides, the hard truth is that if we want high-performing, sustainable outdoor gear, we’ll never be able to rely on organic fabrics alone. They just don’t have the same durability, water-resistance, light weight, or quick-drying properties.

For those reasons, synthetics aren’t going anywhere. And virgin synthetics—those freshly made from fossil fuels as opposed to recycled—aren’t either. That’s because people are slow to come around to the look—and sometimes the feel—of recycled fabrics, even those that are widely available like recycled polyester. And while the upcycled or pre-owned gear market is gaining steam, Basset says it doesn’t solve for one of the biggest reasons people buy clothes: to express themselves, experiment with style, and engage with the art form that is fashion.

So, LifeLabs argues, if people are going to keep buying new stuff (and they are) you might as well make new stuff out of whatever material is the lesser evil. And according to an analysis of Higgs Index reports—the gold standard for measuring materials sustainability—PE has a lower carbon footprint than any other synthetic material on the market, including recycled polyester.

Still, LifeLabs has ambitious plans to keep its products out of landfills. Right now, its first batch of CoolLife products (which launched in October 2021) are made of PE-nylon blends. (WarmLife products are made with recycled polyester and recycled aluminum.) By 2022, though, Mellin says the brand plans to make all threads, glues, and fabrics in CoolLife products from 100-percent PE. That would mean they’re 100-percent recyclable—throw one old shirt into a mechanical recycler and get one new shirt out the other end, minimizing material waste.

LifeLabs isn’t the first brand to pursue product circularity in this way. Patagonia, for example, recycles its own T-shirts. The brand also partners with Infinited Fiber, a Finnish recycler that can turn pretty much anything—including cardboard and agricultural waste—into a soft, cotton-like fabric it calls Infinna, which Patagonia plans to use in T-shirts starting in spring of 2022. In spring 2020, The North Face started making 100-percent polyester sleeping bags and tents that are both fully recycled and recyclable. And in spring of 2021, Salomon released the Index.01, the first fully recyclable running shoe. By 2025, the brand aims to have 100 percent of new products be part of a circular economy.

While LifeLabs hopes to start incorporating recycled PE into CoolLife clothing as early as this year, Basset has her doubts. After all, just because something is recyclable doesn’t mean people will actually recycle it.

“I also think that for small brands, there’s a huge challenge to make [product] circularity viable,” Basset says. That’s because recycling facilities need tons of volume to make a partnership deal worth their while. “They want hundreds and thousands of pants coming in at a regular interval,” says Basset—not just a few stragglers from a capsule collection. The volume issue, incidentally, has been a problem for most of the other brands listed above, she says.

But since PE is widely available from other industrial sources, it’s possible that LifeLabs could still pull off the robust recycling program it’s hinting at, though that remains to be seen.

Sustainability targets aside, LifeLabs’s technology alone could leave it poised to fundamentally alter the outdoor apparel landscape. The brand has released a small collection of everyday products like lifestyle tees, jackets, and sleepwear (again, hitting sort of a weird urban style niche, but we can probably expect this to expand as they add more products). Climbing and running collections are due this coming spring, with ski and snowboard gear to follow. And in the future, Mellin says, customers can expect even more variations on the technology. He mentions a hiking shirt with a cooling lower back and warming sleeves. Or shells with both warming and waterproofing components.

“We’re hybridizing these material combinations really quickly to reach what’s essentially the nirvana of temperature homeostasis,” Mellin says. “We’re going to create new classifications of product that no one has even imagined.”

Climate change is quickly evolving into climate catastrophe, and there’s a narrow window of time to do something about it. While the world works on solutions, there’s surprisingly little focus on the chemical industry, which accounts for roughly 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions — as well as other environmental harms.

Weak or nonexistent regulations of the industry have led to widespread cancer, respiratory illnesses, and even facility explosions, primarily in low-income communities and communities of color.

But the industry essentially has a free pass to continue business as usual — it just keeps on keepin’ on, with little accountability.

The same holds true when it comes to the industry’s contributions to our warming planet, which is happening in three major ways:

First, fossil fuels are the “feedstocks” for chemical manufacturing, meaning that oil, natural gas and coal are used as raw material for chemicals. Global plastic production relies heavily on fossil fuel feedstocks and is expected to grow by 40% by 2030. That will bring more environmental problems. Around 98% of single-use plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and it releases greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its life cycle. Only a small amount of plastic products are recycled. Most end up in landfills or the environment, and nearly one-quarter is incinerated, releasing millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide and other harmful air pollutants.

Second, fossil fuels power chemical manufacturing. Some of the most commonly manufactured “primary” chemicals, like ethylene, propylene, benzene, toluene, ammonia and methanol, account for two-thirds of the energy used by the industry, according to the International Energy Agency.

While the industry has implemented some energy efficiency measures and low-carbon technology, direct carbon dioxide emissions from chemical production have continued to increase.

Third, the chemical industry contributes to climate change by producing chemicals that are themselves potent greenhouse gases. For example, hydrofluorocarbons, used as refrigerants and foam-blowing agents, are 3,800 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide.

Under the Kigali Amendment of the Montreal Protocol, countries have committed to cutting production and consumption of HFCs by at least 80% by 2047. And just this year, the EPA announced a goal to reduce U.S. production. But this may create new problems. For example, some proposed plans for capturing HFCs (rather than replacing them with safer chemicals that don’t harm the climate) will result in emissions of other hazardous air pollutants like chloroform, hydrochloric acid, chlorine and hydrogen fluoride. All of these hazardous air pollutants contribute to the cumulative burden faced by fenceline communities.

Finally, not only does chemical production and use contribute to climate change — the intensifying weather patterns of climate change will worsen the industry’s environmental and public health impacts. Chemical and petrochemical facilities are concentrated along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana: the very same areas that are and will be hit hard by hurricanes, flooding and sea-level rise. Many of these facilities are unprepared for these effects, increasing the risk of catastrophic chemical disasters — predominantly in communities of color and low-income communities.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of aboveground storage facilities containing hazardous chemicals — such as arsenic, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene — are NOT subject to state or federal rules designed to prevent and mitigate spills.https://t.co/C9tYm94kIP

— Center for Progressive Reform (@CPRBlog) December 22, 2021

Ultimately, to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, limit the risk of chemical disasters, and begin to remedy a legacy of environmental injustice, we must significantly reduce and replace the use of fossil fuels in every part of the chemical industry, which needs a systemic overhaul.

It’s a mighty task. Only a handful of more than 40,000 chemicals on the market have ever been restricted; even asbestos hasn’t been fully banned. There are still almost 3.5 billion pounds of hazardous releases to the environment every year. The United States is covered with 1,300 toxic “Superfund” sites, plus thousands more contaminated sites.

But that hasn’t stopped affected communities and organizations from banding together to say enough is enough. Recently a group of more than 100 health, science and environmental justice groups called for a transformation of the chemical industry with the release of the new Louisville Charter.

Named after an area in Kentucky with 11 industrial facilities that release millions of pounds of toxic air emissions every year — disproportionately impacting people of color — the Charter’s 10 principles outline a vision for how to overhaul chemical policies in favor of safety, health, equity and justice, and how to avoid false solutions that simply shift harms to other people and places.

These principles include calls to reduce or eliminate fossil fuel use, substitute toxic chemicals with safer alternatives, remedy environmental injustice, end subsidies for polluting companies, and give communities and workers information about chemical risks and the ability to act upon these disclosures.

We can make gains to achieve these goals if Congress passes the Environmental Justice for All Act and the Build Back Better Act, which would advance the some, but not all, of the Charter’s principles. More action is needed, and the Charter can guide the way.

Whether it’s to solve climate change, stop toxic chemicals from bombarding overburdened communities, or reduce hazardous substances in household products, we need to start replacing harmful chemicals with safe alternatives. No more free passes.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or its employees.

It’s Time to Stop Rolling the Dice on Chemical Disasters

is a policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform and the author of the report, The Chemical Industry: An Overlooked Driver of Climate Change, published by Coming Clean.

It’s 6 p.m. and the pink-tinged skies turn black above Agolan, a village on the outskirts of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Thick plumes of smoke have begun to billow out of dozens of flaring towers, part of an oil refinery owned by an Iraqi energy company called the KAR Group. The towers are just about 150 feet from where 60-year-old Kamila Rashid stands on the front porch of her house. She looks squarely at the oil plant, which sits on what she says used to be her family’s land.

Rashid was born here, like her parents before her and her children after her. She says when KAR moved into the area, residents traded their land for KAR’s promise of jobs and reliable, less expensive electricity for the village. The land was handed over, Rashid says, but she maintains that KAR never provided the promised electricity or long-term jobs.

The towers, also called flare stacks, are used by oil refineries across the globe to burn the byproducts of oil extraction. Such flaring releases a menagerie of hazardous pollutants into the air, including soot, also known as black carbon. “The smoke coats our skin and homes with black soot,” says Rashid. Many villagers keep their windows shut and try to remain indoors whenever possible.

Rashid’s neighbor, 29-year-old Bilah Tasim Mahmoud, joins her on the porch. The younger woman is holding a beat-up notebook with the names of women from Agolan who have miscarried. “No one is counting, but I am,” she says, flipping through the notebook’s pages. “We have had 300 miscarriages in this village since the oil field was developed,” she says, adding that she has been collecting this data but has no one official to take it to.

THE FIFTH CRIME: ECOCIDE An ongoing series, produced in collaboration with Inside Climate News and NBC, about the campaign to make ecocide an international crime. See all stories in the series here.

Miscarriages, of course, are common everywhere, and while pollution writ large is known to be deadly in the aggregate, linking specific health outcomes to local ambient pollution is a notoriously difficult task. Even so, few places on earth beg such questions as desperately as modern Iraq, a country devastated from the northern refineries of Kurdistan to the Mesopotamian marshes of the south — and nearly everywhere in between — by decades of war, poverty, and fossil fuel extraction.

As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, it is easy to find soil and water polluted by depleted uranium, dioxin and other hazardous materials, and extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau — one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.

According to Iraqi physicians, the many overlapping environmental insults could account for the country’s high rates of cancer, birth defects, and other diseases. Preliminary research by local scientists supports these claims, but the country lacks the money and technology needed to investigate on its own. To get a better handle on the scale and severity of the contamination, as well as any health impacts, they say, international teams will need to assist in comprehensive investigations. With the recent close of the ISIS caliphate, experts say, a window has opened.

While the Iraqi government has publicly recognized widespread pollution stemming from conflict and other sources, and implemented some remediation programs, few critics believe these measures will be adequate to address a variegated environmental and public health problem that is both geographically expansive and attributable to generations of decision-makers — both foreign and domestic — who have never truly been held to account. The Iraqi Ministry of Health and the Kurdistan Ministry of Health did not respond to repeated requests for comment on these issues.

Kamila Rashid and her family. The KAR refinery looms in the background. Due to pollution from the refinery, Rashid says, the family’s remaining land is no longer fit for agriculture.

The KAR Group refinery in Agolan village. Rashid says that when KAR moved into the area, residents traded their land for the promise of jobs and cheap electricity, which never materialized.

Children play in front of Bilah Tasim Mahmoud’s home. Mahmoud has been keeping track of the miscarriages that occur in Agolan, though she has no one official to take it to.

“Little priority has historically been given to the environmental dimensions of armed conflict, yet damage to the environment often echoes long into the future,” says Wim Zwijnenburg, who works for the Dutch peace organization PAX and has studied and written about the impact of war on the environment. He has investigated contamination in Iraq and says additional research is needed to clean up harmful toxins and mitigate health risks to people living in post-conflict regions.

The grim state of affairs is not lost on 27-year-old Idris Faroq, Rashid’s nephew, who works at the KAR refinery. (KAR also did not respond to multiple interview requests from Undark.) “If you travel to any village in Iraq, you will find contamination, radiation, and cancers,” he says. “This is the legacy of the American invasion and the wars that came before it — everyone left their waste behind.

“This land,” he added, “has been pillaged.”

Rashid’s family has grown wheat in Agolan for five generations, she says, but 15 years after the construction of the refinery, they are no longer able to support themselves as farmers. Rashid leaves her front porch to walk across the field that stands between her home and the facility. She says it’s the only land still owned by her family. “KAR uses the water from the river for their work and then they dump their waste,” she says, pointing at a pipe piercing through the exterior wall of the refinery. The waste flows directly into her family’s field, she says, and KAR also dumps its waste in the nearby river. The crops no longer grow, Rashid says, and anyway, the land “isn’t safe for agriculture now. And it isn’t safe for us.”

In Kurdistan, miles of pipelines shared with Turkish, Norwegian, and other international energy companies snake across the dry landscape, and the last decade has seen unregulated international, government, and militia oil refineries and oil fields pop up on contested lands, where drilling and flaring unfolds in close proximity to residential areas. Some facilities have been built within villages, expelling residents from their land and homes. People living near the refineries insist that they only started suffering from health ailments after the arrival of these companies and the pollution that came with them.

Rashid specifically mentions the fumes billowing from the flaring towers that surround her home, mindful that pollutants arising from flaring can increase myriad health risks for those living nearby. These towers were designed for the intentional burning of natural gas, a byproduct of pumping oil from the ground. While burning off the excess gas is technically better for the climate than merely venting it into the atmosphere, both have impacts on the climate — and more immediately on local health.

This past July, in an effort to address the issue, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Natural Resources issued a directive, giving oil companies 18 months to halt the flaring and instead seek ways to capture the gas and either reinject it underground, or use as an auxiliary power source. But this would mean additional costs for the companies, and it remains unclear whether the local industry has the technical and financial capacity to comply. And in any case, the government has little leverage to enforce the new policy — particularly given that the Iraqi economy is heavily dependent upon continued and robust oil exports, which account for more than 95 percent of state revenues.

As it stands, Iraq is the world’s sixth-largest oil producer. In 2020, the country ranked only behind Russia in the amount of gas flared, according to the World Bank, and air quality in the north — as with much of the country — can be relentlessly unhealthy to breathe.

Yasin Omar and his two children live in the village of Moqeble near the Kwashe landfill.

The impacts are not only airborne. Roughly 100 miles northwest of Agolan is the Kwashe landfill, a monster dumpsite surrounded by agricultural land and, workers estimate, dozens of oil companies. Used for both domestic and industrial waste, the landfill is leaking oil and industrial waste into the surrounding environment. And like the residents of Agolan, those living in villages near Kwashe say they are suffering from an array of health problems, including migraines, fatigue, skin conditions, miscarriages, cancer, and respiratory problems such as shortness of breath and asthma.

“In Iraq, we often say that every family includes someone with cancer,” says 43-year-old Yasin Omar, who lives less than a mile from the landfill in the village of Moqeble. Omar used to work at an oil company himself until health problems arose. “This village is almost 60 years old and was here long before the oil companies moved in. There used to only be 10 companies here and now there are more than 100,” he says.

According to Omar, many residents have decided to relocate. Some left because they found it so difficult to breathe the polluted air. Others left after developing cancer. Local residents are in an impossible situation, he says, given that the oil companies and a nearby PVC factory provide some of the only employment opportunities. And according to Omar, workers in both places are falling ill. This includes Omar, who says he was diagnosed with cancer last year. His two children, he says, also suffer from health problems.

Cancer has been linked to an overall decline in the health of Iraqis since the 1990s, though precisely what’s driving it is under dispute. In the past, officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Health have said that cancer numbers were rising in large part due to the use of depleted uranium munitions during the 1991 Gulf War by the United States and British militaries. Both countries have disputed those claims.

That’s the problem, experts who study Iraq’s complex mosaic of pollution and health challenges say. Despite overwhelming evidence of pollution and contamination from a variety of sources, it remains exceedingly difficult for Iraqi doctors and scientists to pinpoint the precise cause of any given person’s — or even any community’s — illness; depleted uranium, gas flaring, contaminated crops all might play a role in triggering disease.

Absent international assistance, they say, answers will continue to be elusive. “We don’t have the facilities or equipment,” says Bassim Hmood, a cancer specialist in Al Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, “to test the causes of the cancers.”

Roughly 250 miles south of Agolan, a pediatrician named Eman navigates the bustling, narrow corridors of Baghdad’s Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital. (Eman would only provide her last name to Undark and attempts to follow up with her were unsuccessful.) It’s an August morning and the waiting areas outside the wards are full. Eman stops for a moment to direct a patient to the proper room then pulls a pen from her white physician’s coat to sign a form for another. It’s technically her lunch break, but it’s busy on the ward today. She will work through lunch.

This is Eman’s sixth year at the hospital, and her 25th as a physician. Over that time span, she says, she has seen an array of congenital anomalies, most commonly cleft palates, but also spinal deformities, hydrocephaly, and tumors. At the same time, miscarriages and premature births have spiked among Iraqi women, she says, particularly in areas where heavy U.S. military operations occurred as part of the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 to 2011 Iraq War. 

Research supports many of these clinical observations. According to a 2010 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, leukemia cases in children under 15 doubled from 1993 to 1999 at one hospital in southern Iraq, a region of the country that was particularly hard hit by war. According to other research, birth defects also surged there, from 37 in 1990 to 254 in 2001.

But few studies have been conducted lately, and now, more than 20 years on, it’s difficult to know precisely which factors are contributing to Iraq’s ongoing medical problems. Eman says she suspects contaminated water, lack of proper nutrition, and poverty are all factors, but war also has a role. In particular, she points to depleted uranium, or DU, used by the U.S. and U.K. in the manufacture of tank armor, ammunition, and other military purposes during the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that some 2,000 tons of depleted uranium may have been used in Iraq, and much of it has yet to be cleaned up. The remnants of DU ammunition are spread across 1,100 locations — “and that’s just from the 2003 invasion,” says Zwijnenburg, the Dutch war-and-environment analyst. “We are still missing all the information from the 1991 Gulf War that the U.S. said was not recorded and could not be shared.”

Souad Naji Al-Azzawi, an environmental engineer and a retired University of Baghdad professor, knows this problem well. In 1991, she was asked to review plans to reconstruct some of Baghdad’s water treatment plants, which had been destroyed at the start of the Gulf War, she says. A few years later, she led a team to measure the impact of radiation on soldiers and Iraqi civilians in the south of the country.

Around that same time, epidemiological studies found that from 1990 to 1997, cases of childhood leukemia increased 60 percent in the southern Iraqi town of Basra, which had been a focal point of the fighting. Over the same time span, the number of children born with severe birth defects tripled. Al-Azzawi’s work suggests that the illnesses are linked to depleted uranium. Other work supports this finding and suggests that depleted uranium is contributing to elevated rates of cancer and other health problems in adults, too.

Today, remnants of tanks and weapons line the main highway from Baghdad to Basra, where contaminated debris remains a part of residents’ everyday lives. In one family in Basra, Zwijnenburg noted, all members had some form of cancer, from leukemia to bone cancers.

Tanks were removed from this depleted uranium site along a main road in Basra, but remnants of weaponry pollute the soils and water.

To Al-Azzawi, the reasons for such anomalies seem plain. Much of the land in this area is contaminated with depleted uranium oxides and particles, she said. It is in the water, in the soil, in the vegetation. “The population of west Basra showed between 100 and 200 times the natural background radiation levels,” Al-Azzawi says.

Some remediation efforts have taken place. For example, says Al-Azzawi, two so-called tank graveyards in Basra were partially remediated in 2013 and 2014. But while hundreds of vehicles and pieces of artillery were removed, these graveyards remain a source of contamination. The depleted uranium has leached into the water and surrounding soils. And with each sandstorm —  a common event — the radioactive particles are swept into neighborhoods and cities.

Cancers in Iraq catapulted from 40 cases among 100,000 people in 1991 to at least 1,600 by 2005.

In Fallujah, a central Iraqi city that has experienced heavy warfare, doctors have also reported a sharp rise in birth defects among the city’s children. According to a 2012 article in Al Jazeera, Samira Alani, a pediatrician at Fallujah General Hospital, estimated that 14 percent of babies born in the city had birth defects — more than twice the global average.

Alani says that while her research clearly shows a connection between contamination and congenital anomalies, she still faces challenges to painting a full picture of the affected areas, in part because data was lacking from Iraq’s birth registry. It’s a common refrain among doctors and researchers in Iraq, many of whom say they simply don’t have the resources and capacity to properly quantify the compounding impacts of war and unchecked industry on Iraq’s environment and its people. “So far, there are no studies. Not on a national scale,” says Eman, who has also struggled to conduct studies because there is no nationwide record of birth defects or cancers. “There are only personal and individual efforts.”

“Every U.S. base had a burn pit,” Salam Alzaidi says bluntly, taking a seat in a cafe on the outskirts of Baghdad. Between 2009 and 2010, he worked at bases across Iraq as a program manager for L3 Harris Technologies, an American aerospace and defense company.

During the Iraq War, U.S. military bases used burn pits as a way to dispose of an array of industrial, military, and medical waste, which was variously comprised of paint, plastics, used medical supplies, electronics, spent munitions, petroleum products, lubricants, rubber, and an array of other items, including human waste. The refuse was burned in open pits, sometimes along with unexploded ordnance — an ostensibly “controlled detonation.” According to reports, at just one base, Balad Air Base, the U.S. military burned an estimated 140 tons of waste a day in open air pits.

The burning of such material created clouds of black smoke made up of numerous pollutants, including particulate matter and dioxins like a chemical weapon called hexachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin. “Even though these were controlled detonations, they would leave the whole area contaminated,” says Alzaidi. “These were huge detonations, and many bases are located near residential and agricultural areas.”

(The actual number of bases with burn pits is contested, but the U.S. military has only publicly identified around 40. In an email to Undark, Richard Kidd, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Environment and Energy Resilience, acknowledged that the military still had nine active burn pits at bases throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan, though he did not respond to other questions regarding contamination or Iraqi residents’ claims of health problems related to burn pits.)

Alzaidi says he worried about the health of residents living close to the bases. He recalls a time in 2006 — before he started working on the burn pits — when military waste was burned at a base in Anbar and the U.S. military used speakers to warn locals not to drink the water in their village for a week. “They just said, ‘do not drink this water,’ but did not explain why,” says Alzaidi. He says that most of the locals didn’t understand what was said through the speakers, and those who did were uncertain about how, exactly, the water was contaminated. Many drank the water anyway.

After the Gulf War, many veterans suffered from a condition now known as Gulf War syndrome. Though the causes of the illness are to this day still subject to widespread speculation, possible causes include exposure to depleted uranium, chemical weapons, and smoke from burning oil wells. More than 200,000 veterans who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East have reported major health issues to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which they believe are connected to burn pit exposure. Last month, the White House announced new actions to make it easier for such veterans to access care.

Numerous studies have shown that the pollution stemming from these burn pits has caused severe health complications for American veterans. Active duty personnel have reported respiratory difficulties, headaches, and rare cancers allegedly derived from the burn pits in Iraq and locals living nearby also claim similar health ailments, which they believe stem from pollutants emitted by the burn pits.

Keith Baverstock, head of the Radiation Protection Program at the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe from 1991 to 2003, says the health of Iraqi residents is likely also at risk from proximity to the burn pits. “If surplus DU has been burned in open pits, there is a clear health risk” to people living within a couple of miles, he says.

Abdul Wahab Hamed lives near the former U.S. Falcon base in Baghdad. His nephew, he says, was born with severe birth defects. The boy cannot walk or talk, and he is smaller than other children his age. Hamed says his family took the boy to two separate hospitals and after extensive work-ups, both facilities blamed the same culprit: the burn pits. Residents living near Camp Taji, just north of Baghdad also report children born with spinal disfigurements and other congenital anomalies, but they say that their requests for investigation have yielded no results.  

More than a dozen rivers snake through Iraq, tributaries of the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow into the Mesopotamian Marshes, also known as the Iraqi Marshes, a wetland area located in the southern part of the country. Once, the marshes were a literal oasis in the desert, but now they are a thirsty expanse. Sun scorched grasslands lead the way to what is left of the dried-out marshes. These marshes are not only wracked by evaporation, they are also badly polluted with the black wastewater carried in from sewage pipes that connect back with the region’s heavy industry.

Azhar Al-Asadi, a 31-year-old member of Save the Tigris organization and a water environmentalist, stands outside his home nestled on the corner of a quiet street. In the crook of his arm is his masters thesis on pollution in the nearby marshes. He keeps his hands stuffed inside his pockets, only removing them briefly to wipe sweat from his brow. It is a stifling 123 degrees Fahrenheit, and there’s not a whip of wind to offer any respite.

“The land here is starved of water,” says Al-Asadi. “The little water we have is heavily polluted and contaminated. Everything living is dying — plants, animals, and humans. There needs to be a concrete plan for sustaining everyday life on this land. Iraq needs to work towards environmental sustainability,” he says. “But these marshes are being abandoned. They are a dumping ground.”

Abdul Wahab Hamed, who lives near the former U.S. Falcon Base, says his nephew was born with severe birth defects. According to local hospitals, the likely cause is the burn pits.

Environmentalist Azhar Al-Asadi has studied the pollution in marshes near Al-Chibayish. He says the marshes are a dumping ground and advocates for Iraq to make a sustainability plan.

Al-Asadi, like his father before him, was born and has spent his entire life in the town of Al-Chibayish in Dhi Qar Governorate, in southern Iraq, where the family once enjoyed fishing the meandering waterways. “I love this region,” he says, now standing beside his boat and looking out across the marshes that stretch to the horizon in every direction. The water is undisturbed, barely rocking Al-Asadi’s boat. The tall marsh grass lining the narrow waterways barely quivers in the still heat.

“I remember fishing here with my father as a young boy, but look at it now: the fish are already dead, floating on top of the water,” he says, pointing out a pile of fish floating in stagnant green water near a sewage point. It’s a familiar complaint in and around the marshes. Iraq’s environmental crisis bears heavily on the Euphrates and the Tigris, which provide nearly all the water to the country. Contamination in both waterways and their many tributaries is rife — byproducts of decades of both inadvertent and deliberate destruction.

During the war with Iran, which spanned the 1980s, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein accused the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, known collectively as Marsh Arabs, of treachery. He dammed and drained Iraq’s iconic marshes to flush out rebels hiding in the reeds. By 2001, the wetlands were less than 7 percent of their size, according to estimates in a United Nations Environment Program report. Though the marshes had been partially restored since then, they are now dwindling once again.

Then, at the start of the Iraq War, the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center — known colloquially as the “yellowcake factory” — was looted. Barrels of radioactive waste were emptied in and around the facility just outside Baghdad. Some of the barrels containing uranium were stolen and dumped in rivers and barrels were found and used by people in the surrounding villages to preserve water and food, not knowing they were contaminated, says Al-Azzawi. Local residents were additionally exposed via contaminated dust.

Now Iraq’s waterways face a new threat. Seventy percent of Iraq’s industrial waste is being dumped directly into rivers or the sea, according to researchers. Harry Istepanian, senior fellow at the Iraq Energy Institute, says that the rivers and crisscrossed canals leading off the marshes in southern Iraq are highly contaminated with industry waste, sewage, pesticides, sunken ships, and other military debris that have sat at the bottom of the waterways since the 1980s.

Ships seemingly covered in rust can be seen half submerged in water around the marshes, he says. Many of them “still hold oil products, unexploded ordnance, and possibly rocket fuel, propellants, and toxic chemicals” and may still be leaking, he wrote in an email to Undark. “There are still more than 260 sunken ships — including tankers, tugs, barges, and patrol boats,” he continued, which clog the waters and, if dredged, might cause additional water pollution.

A 2019 U.N. Environment Program report noted that old and poorly maintained oil pipelines across the country were leading to spillages that were having a significant impact on the health of Iraqi communities as well as natural ecosystems. Istepanian says several of these spillages were near the Basra Shuaiba refinery’s wastewater infrastructure. A 2016 study published in the Engineering and Technology Journal analyzed dozens of water samples over a six month period. The authors found extreme levels of water pollution in the vicinity of the refinery and downstream of the Shatt Al-Basra river into which the refinery’s wastewater is dumped. In 2019, Human Rights Watch warned that the high salinity of Shatt Al-Arab river in Basra will cause serious environmental and health problems.

“Shatt-al-Arab and its canals,” Istepanian says, are “a stream of toxic waste.” There is fear that the 2018 water crisis might happen again. That summer, at least 118,000 people were hospitalized due to symptoms doctors identified as related to water quality, he says. And the soil contamination and air pollution from expanding oil fields and gas flaring are infiltrating area aquifers. “The polluted groundwater is now becoming extremely difficult and costly to make it safe, and it may be unusable for decades,” he adds.

Al-Asadi studied two of six sewage points in Al-Chibayish for his 2019 masters thesis. He collected samples in 2018 and 2019 and worked to identify the degree of pollution they are producing. “One sewage station alone will reach 1,200 square meters of the marshes per hour,” he says. “My study clearly showed that these sewage stations produce pollution which is harmful to human beings, animals, and plants.”

The Mesopotamian Marshes, also known as the Iraqi Marshes, are a wetland area located in the southern part of the country.

The marshes are polluted with wastewater from the region’s industry, often dumped directly into waterways by sewage pipes.

In the 1980s, to flush out rebels hiding in the marshes, then-President Saddam Hussein had them dammed and drained. As a result, the wetlands dwindled to less than 7 percent of their size.

The light from an oil company’s flaring reflects on polluted waters near Basra. Some canals in the region have been described as “a stream of toxic waste.”

Al-Asadi shows a photo of pollution draining into the marshes, which he studied for his masters thesis. He has found the waterways contain high levels of harmful toxins such as phosphorus, ammonium, and nitrate.

There is no upstream filtration system, Al-Asadi says, which means waste from hospitals, industry, and more “is going straight into the marshes.” Throughout his research, he has collected samples from the waterways in Chibayish and found the water to contain high levels of harmful toxins such as phosphorus, ammonium, and nitrate. “The water belongs to everyone, and yet it is not safe for anyone,” he says. His findings, which published in 2020,  match up with previous work in the area. For instance, in 2011, a team of Iraqi scientists reported the same pollutants in the waterways in the Journal of Environmental Protection. Other research has found heavy metals and hydrocarbons in the marshes, and confirmed the high levels of salinity.

​Al-Asadi says he can measure the radiation and pollution in the marshes, but Iraq only has basic equipment for testing and so the samples must be sent outside of the country, a lengthy and expensive process. But despite the challenges, he says, he will continue his research to raise public awareness about the pollution. 

“The government, civil society organizations, and the public are doing nothing to prevent the pollution or find alternatives,” says Al-Asadi.

“I showed my findings to Iraqi government officials but they just ignored my studies. They are responsible to prevent more pollution or at least transfer these companies to remote areas. If they don’t, the conditions will deteriorate further and then we will be at the point where we can no longer amend the situation.”

In 2020, the U.N. Environment Program announced initiatives to address the steep environmental challenges in Iraq. That September, for instance, the organization announced a partnership with the Iraqi government to spend $2.5 million to help the country adapt to climate change. One month later, the U.N. Environment Program and the U.N. Development Program in Iraq signed an agreement to accelerate their environmental goals, which the organizations aim to hit by 2030, including addressing pollution and waste management.

In a press release, Zena Ali Ahmad, resident representative of the U.N. Development Program in Iraq, said: “Iraq faces a number of environmental challenges — from water scarcity, to rising temperatures, to pollution, to environmental degradation due to years of conflict and neglect. Tackling these challenges in a complex setting like Iraq cannot be done alone.” (The U.N. Environment Program did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

Meanwhile, the toll of the country’s longstanding environmental devastation continues.

Back in Agolan village in Kurdistan, the KAR Group has begun flaring again. To Idris Faroq, Rashid’s nephew, it’s just another insult in a land scarred by generations of combat and unchecked greed – both foreign and domestic. “Meanwhile,” he says, “there is nothing left for us.”

Rashid suggests there is one thing left behind: illness. Standing in the former wheat field near her home, she gazes at the raging flames towering several stories above her. She has to shout to be heard above rumbling noise of the flaring gas.

“Everyone here is sick,” she says. “When I’m trying to breathe, it’s like I’m dying.”

Lynzy Billing is a freelance writer and photographer based in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Fifth Crime is an ongoing series, produced in collaboration with Inside Climate News and NBC, about the campaign to make “ecocide” an international crime. See other installments here.