Dressed head to toe in plastic, Modou Fall is a familiar sight in Dakar. But however playful his costume, his goal couldn’t be more serious: ridding the capital of the scourge of plastic bags.
DAKAR, Senegal — As the marathon runners stretched and took their places on the starting line, one man stood out, dressed, as he was, in plastic from head to toe.
A multicolored cape made entirely of plastic bags swept the sandy ground. A hat constructed out of plastic sunglasses was perched on his head.
But this man, Modou Fall, was not competing in the annual marathon held in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, each November. He was participating in a different kind of race: one to save the West African country from the scourge of plastic waste that clogged its waterways, marred its white beaches and constantly blew across its streets.
With the marathon drawing large crowds and a major media presence, he could not pass up the chance the race presented to promote his cause.
Waving the Senegalese flag and carrying a loudspeaker from which spilled songs cataloging the damage caused by plastic — “I like my country, I say no to plastic bags” — Mr. Fall swished in and around the runners in his long plastic cloak as the race began.
Those at the race who stopped him to ask for selfies fell into his well-laid and oft-used trap: He seized every opportunity to give them a gentle lecture about environmental issues.
After the last group of runners had left the starting area, Mr. Fall and his team of volunteers began to pick up the empty water bottles and plastic bags they had left behind.
For the foreign racers and tourists the marathon brought to Dakar, this might have been their first encounter with Mr. Fall, but for local residents, he’s a familiar presence known as “Plastic Man.”
Mr. Fall offering paper bags as an alternative to plastic at a market on the outskirts of Dakar.Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
He can often be seen dancing through the streets dressed in a self-designed and ever-evolving costume made entirely of plastic, mostly bags collected from across the city. Pinned to his chest is a sign that reads NO PLASTIC BAGS. It’s a fight he takes very seriously.
His costume is modeled after the “Kankurang”— an imposing traditional figure deeply rooted in Senegalese culture who stalks sacred forests and wears a shroud of woven grasses. The Kankurang is considered a protector against bad spirits, and in charge of teaching communal values.
“I behave like the Kankurang,” Mr. Fall said in a recent interview. “I am an educator, a defender and a protector of the environment.”
While plastic waste poses a severe environmental problem around the globe, recent studies have found Senegal, despite its relatively small size, to be among the top countries polluting the world’s oceans with plastic. This is in part because it struggles to manage its waste, like many poorer countries,and it has a large population living on the coast.
In an effort to reduce its share of pollution, the Senegalese government implemented a ban on some plastic products in 2020, but the country has had a hard time enforcing it. Senegal, with a population of about 17 million, is projected to produce more than 700,000 metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste by 2025 if nothing is done, compared with about 337,000 metric tons in the United States.
A scene in Bargny, a coastal town in Senegal. Like many poorer countries, Senegal struggles to manage its plastic waste. Leo Correa/Associated Press
Mr. Fall, 48, has been fighting against plastic waste for most of his adult life. A tall, quietly charismatic former soldier, he first noticed plastic’s damaging effects in 1998 during his military service. He was stationed in rural eastern Senegal, home to many herding communities, where he saw their cows getting sick after consuming the fragments of plastic bags that littered the arid landscape.
The herders would slaughter their valuable animals before they inevitably died. This way, at least, eating their meat would not be haram, or forbidden by Islam.
After his military service, Mr. Fall sold T-shirts and life buoys in Dakar’s busy Sandaga market, where dozens of traders displayed all kind of goods, often packed in plastic. Plastic bags were cheap and plentiful, and shopkeepers would toss them into the street with abandon, unaware of how they could harm the environment.
For months, Mr. Fall tried to get his fellow shopkeepers to recognize the environmental threat posed by using so much plastic, and if they did use it, to dispose of it properly. But nobody listened. The market was a mess.
Fed up, one day he decided to try leading by example. He would clean up the entire market on his own.
Mr. Fall on the streets of Dakar during November’s marathon.Ricci Shryock for The New York Times
“It took me 13 days, but I did it,” he said.
The plastic eventually came back. But he’d succeeded in making some of the stall holders think twice.
And stopping the rising tide of plastic became Mr. Fall’s obsession. “If it continues like this, the lives of future generations are in jeopardy,” he said.
In 2006, Mr. Fall used his life savings, just over $500, to found his association, Senegal Propre, or Clean Senegal.
He planted dozens of trees across the city and held community meetings to persuade people to stop buying throwaway plastic. He organized cleaning and tire recycling campaigns in Dakar’s lively neighborhoods, his waste pickers dodging taxi drivers and street vendors as they went.
With the plastic waste they collected, Clean Senegal made bricks, paving stones and public benches. Old tires became couches that they sold for about $430 apiece — money that went toward more environmental efforts like planting trees at schools.
Other street vendors began to see the point of what he was doing, and joined in.
“I used to throw plastic bags or cups in the street after use because I wasn’t aware of the dangers it could cause,” said Cheikh Seck, 31, who sells sunglasses and watches in Pikine, his home suburb in Dakar. “Plastic waste is a global concern, and I am more than happy to contribute to the fight that Modou started.”
The plastic waste clogging up the ocean waters off Dakar has damaged fishing stocks, further decreasing the incomes of Senegalese fishermen already struggling against their waters being overfished. Plastic can also poison agricultural land.
Mr. Fall and volunteers picking up trash on a Dakar beach on World Cleanup Day, in 2018.Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Mr. Fall’s message seems to be catching on. At November’s marathon, the third one he has cleaned up after, some of the runners now knew his favorite slogan and yelled it to him as they passed: “No to plastic waste!”
Following much of the marathon route, Mr. Fall and his team of 10 young volunteers in green shirts and gloves fanned out for their cleanup operation.
They picked up water bottles outside Dakar’s pioneering Museum of Black Civilizations, which showcases one of Africa’s largest art collections. They collected hundreds of plastic bags on the leafy campus of Cheikh Anta Diop University. They found plastic cups in the thrumming city center, known as Plateau, home to the presidential palace and many embassies.
One of the neighborhoods they passed through was Medina, built by the French during the colonial period, and where Mr. Fall was born. After his father died when he was 4, Mr. Fall’s mother moved the family to the suburbs. As a single mother, she struggled to make ends meet running a restaurant, and Mr. Fall had to leave school after only six years of primary education to support the family by taking jobs in metalworking and house painting. After his mother died, he joined the army.
By midafternoon of the marathon day, Mr. Fall and his team were staggering under the weight of the plastic they had collected. A van drove up and they handed over hundreds of plastic bottles.
The team took a short break for lunch. But not Mr. Fall. He was still focused on his mission. There were five miles to go along the race route, and he set off, his plastic cape floating around him.
Those at the marathon often stopped Mr. Fall to ask for a selfie. He seized the chance to give those posing with him a gentle lecture about environmental issues.Ricci Shryock for The New York Times
Only around half of Americans have easy access to curbside recycling. For some others, recycling might mean bringing old bottles and boxes to an inconvenient drop-off site—and for still others, there may be no recycling options at all. In many rural communities, even if they wanted access to recycling, it would be a financial challenge to build recycling infrastructure: a new center for sorting out recyclables can cost as much as $30 million. And trucking items off to a distant recycling center is both expensive and has a large carbon footprint, pretty much negating the positive impact of recycling in the first place.
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A new program aims to build smaller local facilities instead, with a cost per facility of around $1.5 million. Backed by $35 million in new funding from PepsiCo, the program, called the Closed Loop Local Recycling Fund, will work to install mini recycling facilities in “recycling deserts” around the country. “We know that there are major swaths of the country that just really don’t have recycling in a way that people are willing to use,” says Bridget Croke, managing director at Closed Loop Partners, a circular economy investment firm that is managing the initiative. It’s especially problematic in states like Texas where populations are quickly growing, but recycling infrastructure hasn’t kept up.
While a large MRF (or, material recycling facility) might rely more heavily on technology that can automatically sort materials, the mini-MRF design—around four to five times smaller—is simpler, too, with a small circular conveyor belt that brings the recyclables past workers who manually sort them into bales. (The conveyor belt brings items around multiple times, a little like a baggage carousel at an airport, so that if things are missed on the first go-round, they can be caught on a subsequent round or two.) The modular design, from a company called Revolution Systems, can grow if a community has more demand over time. The manual process is expected to help yield higher-quality, better-sorted recyclable materials like plastic, adding to the supply of material that companies like PepsiCo can use as they incorporate more recycled content into their packaging.
[Photo: courtesy Revolution Systems]
“We need to unlock new supplies of recycled plastics for our portfolio, and we think Closed Loop is the right partner to do that with,” says Jason Blake, chief sustainability officer and senior vice president at PepsiCo Beverages North America. The company aims to cut the use of virgin plastic in half across its global food-and-beverage portfolio by 2030. (Some brands are moving faster in certain markets—in several European countries, some Pepsi products will be sold in 100% recycled plastic beginning this year.)
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Having a supply of enough recycled plastic is a challenge for beverage companies as many ramp up their goals to buy new recycled material while others are adding to the demand—including brands making products like shoes from recycled plastic bottles, or cities paving roads with the material. “If you look at the 2025 goals that companies are making, there’s just not enough material for them all to be able to achieve those goals,” says Croke.
Through the new program, PepsiCo will also buy directly from the recycling facilities. “It creates a more secure market for the longer term, which is something that we’re always talking about in recycling,” she says. Longer-term contracts can help guarantee a more consistent price for recycled plastic, which has jumped up and down in value.
Many environmental advocates argue that recycling alone isn’t a solution. “Beverage companies should be focusing on shifting away from single-use plastic to refillable purchases,” says John Hocevar, a campaign director at Greenpeace. “We are still seeing most companies focusing too much on recycling, even though very little plastic is recycled at all, and almost none is recycled more than once. For plastic, recycling is just a brief pause between fracking on one end and being dumped or burned on the other.”
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Even in communities in the U.S. that have easy access to recycling means, recycling rates are still relatively low. Overall, in 2021, only around a third of the plastic bottles sold in the U.S. were actually recycled; and because the volumes produced are enormous, so, too, the vast amount of plastic bottles that end up in landfills. “Coca-Cola alone produces about 110 billion plastic bottles each year,” Hocevar says. “It’s hard to believe that there is anyone at this stage who sees that as sustainable.”
PepsiCo, like its competitors, has added some refillable products; the company owns SodaStream, and last year, stopped selling its bubly sparkling water brand in plastic bottles, using the SodaStream platform instead. Still, the vast majority of its products are in single-use packaging. It’s not inevitable—soda companies did use refillable packaging before the 1970s—but systems would have to change more broadly to make that possible again.
Croke says that Closed Loop Partners is pushing brands to move to reusable packaging, but “single use is highly unlikely to fully go away in the next 10 years,” so strengthening recycling infrastructure is critical.
A new study has found that the release of novel entities — artificial chemicals and other human-made pollutants — has accelerated to a point that we have crossed a “planetary boundary,” threatening the entire Earth operating system, along with humanity.
The study authors argue that the breach of this critical planetary boundary has occurred because the rate at which novel entities are being developed and produced by industry exceeds governments’ ability to assess risk and monitor impacts.
There are about 350,000 different types of artificial chemicals currently on the international market, with production of existing and new synthetic chemicals set to substantially increase in the coming decades.
While many of these substances have been shown to negatively affect the natural world and human health, the vast majority have yet to be evaluated, with their interactions and impacts poorly understood or completely unknown.
Many thousands of human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants are circulating throughout our world, with new ones entering production all the time — so many, in fact, that scientists now say we’ve crossed a critical threshold that heightens the risk of destabilizing the entire Earth operating system and posing a clear threat to humanity.
There are about 350,000 different types of artificial chemicals currently in the global market, from plastics to pesticides to industrial chemicals like flame retardants and insulators. While research has shown that many of these chemicals can have deleterious impacts on the natural world and human health, most substances have not been evaluated, with their interactions and impacts not yet understood or entirely unknown.
“The knowledge gaps are massive and we don’t have the tools to understand all of what is being produced or released or [what is] having effects,” Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist and microplastics researcher from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We just don’t know. So we try to look at what we do know and add up all these little puzzle pieces to get a big picture.”
As scientists endeavor to identify and understand the impacts of chemicals and other artificial substances — referred to en masse as “novel entities” — industries are pumping them out at a staggering rate. The global production of chemicals has increased fiftyfold since 1950, and this is expected to triple by 2050, according to a report published by the European Environment Agency. While some novel entities are regulated by governmental bodies and international agreements, many can be produced without any restrictions or controls.
The mismatch between the rapid rate at which novel entities are being produced, compared to the snail’s pace at which governments assess risk and monitor impacts — leaving society largely flying blind as to chemical threats — is what prompted Carney Almroth and colleagues to make a weighty argument in a new paper published in Science and Technology: that we have breached the “planetary boundary” for novel entities, endangering the stability of the planet we call home.
An estimated 350,000 different kinds of chemicals are currently in the global market, yet most substances have not been evaluated. Image by MolnarSzabolcsErdely via Pixabay.
Quantifying the novel entities boundary
The concept of planetary boundaries was first proposed by a team of international scientists in 2009 to articulate key natural processes that, when kept in balance, support biodiversity; but when disrupted beyond a certain threshold, can destabilize and even destroy the Earth’s ability to function and support life. Nine boundaries have been identified: climate change, biosphere integrity, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol pollution, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, land-system change, and of course, the release of novel chemicals.
Many of these boundaries have clear thresholds. For instance, scientists determined that humanity would overshoot the safe operating space for climate change when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 350 parts per million (ppm), which happened in 1988. The threshold for novel entities, however, has until recently evaded definition, largely because of the knowledge gaps surrounding these substances.
Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a plastic pollution researcher at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Centre, who co-authored the new paper, said these knowledge gaps aren’t present because these chemicals and other polluting substances don’t pose risks — it’s because scientists are still scrambling to understand novel entities and the myriad ways they can impact the natural world.
“It’s a very new field of study,” Villarrubia-Gómez told Mongabay in a video interview. “It’s in its infancy in comparison to other major environmental problems … most research has been done in the past seven years.”
Carney Almroth said researchers have used the Holocene, the current geological epoch that began just over 10,000 years ago, as a measuring point to quantify the thresholds of other planetary boundaries, but this approach wasn’t appropriate for novel entities.
“This boundary is different from the others because the others are all referring back to the Holocene conditions — that was 10,000 years of a very stable Earth system and Earth climate,” Carney Almroth said. Scientists “can look back and ask, ‘What were carbon dioxide levels then and where was nitrogen and phosphorus during that time period?’ and refer back to that [as a baseline]. We couldn’t do that because novel entities didn’t exist during that time period and the background baseline levels would be zero for most of them.”
Instead, the researchers gathered all of the information they could on artificial chemicals and other pollutants, looking at their impacts all along their supply chain, from extraction to production to use, and eventually, to their disposal as waste. Then they used a weight-of-evidence approach to determine that novel entities could, in fact, disrupt the planet’s stability.
“The weight of evidence indicates now that we are exceeding the boundary, but there’s more work to be done,” Carney Almroth said.
Björn Beeler, the international coordinator for the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), who was not involved in this new research, called it a “very smart academic paper” that illustrates the need to act.
“We’re about to enter an exponential growth period,” Beeler told Mongabay in a phone interview. “If you’re concerned about toxic substance exposure, the amount of toxic substances [including plastic pollution] is set to grow three- [or] fourfold in the decades ahead.”
He added: “If you’re worried about it now, it’s set to get a lot worse.”
With science falling far behind in assessing risk, and governments largely failing to regulate chemicals, humanity is flying blind into a future where the unforeseen impacts of chemical pollutants could be catastrophic.
The release of novel entities isn’t the only planetary boundary that humanity has breached. Climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change and the biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus have also pushed past the safe operating limits that keep Earth a habitable place.
As the demand for oil decreases, petrochemical companies are ramping up their plastic production. Image by Louis Vest via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
An ‘existential’ threat to humanity
What is known about chemical substances and other pollutants has long raised alarms among experts — dating back to Rachel Carson and the publication of Silent Spring, which helped launch the modern environmental movement. Hazardous chemicals such as pesticides can damage soil health, contaminate drinking water, and even get carried on the wind, to impact a wider environment and disrupt populations of birds, mammals and fish. Many of the chemicals we ingest, such as pharmaceuticals, persist after being flushed down the toilet, with wastewater polluting rivers and oceans, or even the land when contaminated solid sewage sludge is used to fertilize crops.
Chemical persistence in the environment is a major thorny problem: Research has shown that polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — highly toxic and carcinogenic substances banned by the U.S. as far back as 1977 and once widely used in coolants and oil paints — have continued building up in the blubber of killer whales (Orcinus orca), posing a genuine threat to a species that is already struggling in many parts of the world. So called “forever chemicals” — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), that are highly toxic, carcinogenic and act like endocrine disruptors, are currently commonly used in disposable food packaging, cookware, cosmetics and even dental floss. A recent report also found them to be common in most of the drinking water in the U.S. They take hundreds or thousands of years to break down, but no U.S. limits have yet been placed on the concentration of forever chemicals in water.
“Even if we were to stop using and releasing [many novel entities], they would still be [here] for decades, or centuries, depending on what [substance] we’re talking about,” Carney Almroth said, adding that the risk of residual impacts from novel entities makes it even more imperative to stop, or at least slow down, the release of these substances.
The new paper in Science and Technology takes a specific look at plastics, which have become ever-present in daily life as food packaging, kitchenware and appliances. In recent years, much attention has been paid to the trillions of microplastics — fragments smaller than 5 millimeters, or three-sixteenths of an inch — polluting the global oceans, and the potential for larger plastic pieces to entangle or choke wildlife. New research shows that the sea breeze can even propel microplastics into the atmosphere, contaminating the very air we breathe and impacting climate change.
Plastic is highly problematic since it’s made out of a cocktail of chemicals that can leach out dangerous substances, especially when heated, cooled or scratched. A chemical compound known as bisphenol A (BPA) has been shown to act as an endocrine disruptor and interfere with hormones, impact immune systems and even promote certain cancers. One study even found that BPA can be absorbed into the human body through mere skin contact. But it’s not just BPA that’s harmful — many BPA alternatives have been found to be equally a risk to human health.
“We have been told for many, many decades that [plastics are] inert, and that they don’t release chemicals to their surroundings,” Villarrubia-Gómez said. “More and more, we’re discovering that that’s not true. Plastic leaches other chemicals … and we are in contact with [plastic] the whole day.”
Plastic isn’t just a problem in its end state. To make plastic, which uses petroleum as its base, greenhouse gases like ethane and methane need to be fracked from the ground and “cracked” into new compounds, the precursors to plastics. These industrial processes can release a number of toxic chemicals, along with various greenhouse gases, into the environment. The production of plastics is also intimately tied to the fossil fuel industry; as demand for oil drops, the petrochemical industry is ramping up its production of plastics.
“They see plastics as their next piggy bank,” Carney Almroth said. “Simultaneously, there’s a big push for an increase in plastics production and plastic use and plastic sales.”
Beeler said the release of novel entities into the environment poses a similar risk as climate change. “They’re both existential threats to humanity,” he noted. “Climate change [will determine] where you can live and how you can have a livelihood. Chemicals actually just remove your health — it’s very, very direct and personal. So I would draw them [as being at] the same crisis levels. It’s just that we’re not that socially conscious of chemicals and chemical safety, as we are of climate now.”
Determining a chemical’s risk often takes many years of methodical research, as scientists trace the causal connections between a synthetic substance and resulting environmental and health impacts. By then, that substance will often be ubiquitous, used in products across society.
Many chemicals will persist in the environment for a long time after they have stopped being released by industries. Image by yogendras31 via Pixabay.
‘Uptick in awareness’
While change is urgently needed to mitigate the impacts of novel entities, Carney Almroth said such an industrial paradigm shift would require a “massive overhaul of systemic societal structures.”
Industries that produce novel entities are “supported by the fact that we require constant economic growth,” she said. “This is one of the ways that they’ve been able to keep producing and using chemicals, even in the face of toxicity data, because they can show that it can grow economies, provide jobs, provide materials and so on and so forth.”
Despite the enormity of the problem, there may be opportunities for change in the near future. For instance, there are calls to form an international panel on chemical pollution, similar to those institutions focused on biodiversity and climate, such as the IUCN or the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In February and March, the U.N. Environment Assembly (UNEA) will also be meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss a number of environmental issues, including whether to mandate a new global treaty on plastics.
Beeler said that while negotiations may swing in the direction of only treating plastic as a waste issue, there are calls to address the entire plastic life cycle, taking into account all of the chemicals and pollutants plastic releases into the environment from production to waste stream.
He also said there’s also a reason for optimism in the way heightened public interest in plastic pollution has helped raise awareness of the larger problem of synthetic chemical contaminants.
“There’s been a small uptick in awareness [of] the harm from chemicals … due to the affiliation and link to plastics,” he said. “But prior to plastics, it was really [an awareness] desert — and plastics have created a little oasis of growing consciousness.”
Citations:
Allen, S., Allen, D., Moss, K., Le Roux, G., Phoenix, V. R., & Sonke, J. E. (2020). Examination of the ocean as a source for atmospheric microplastics. PLOS ONE , 15(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0232746
Desforges, J., Hall, A., McConnell, B., Rosing-Asvid, A., Barber, J. L., Brownlow, A., … Dietz, R. (2018). Predicting global killer whale population collapse from PCB pollution. Science, 361(6409), 1373-1376. doi:10.1126/science.aat1953
Ma, Y., Liu, H., Wu, J., Yuan, L., Wang, Y., Du, X., … Zhang, H. (2019). The adverse health effects of bisphenol a and related toxicity mechanisms. Environmental Research, 176, 108575. doi:10.1016/j.envres.2019.108575
Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., … Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E., … Foley, J. (2009). Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2). Retrieved from https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/
Wang, Z., Walker, G. W., Muir, D. C., & Nagatani-Yoshida, K. (2020). Toward a global understanding of chemical pollution: A first comprehensive analysis of national and regional chemical inventories. Environmental Science & Technology, 54(5), 2575-2584. doi:10.1021/acs.est.9b06379
Zalko, D., Jacques, C., Duplan, H., Bruel, S., & Perdu, E. (2011). Viable skin efficiently absorbs and metabolizes bisphenol a. Chemosphere, 82(3), 424-430. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2010.09.058
Banner image caption: Plastic pollution in the ocean. Image by Naja Bertolt Jensen via Unsplash.
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.
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Ask someone for a fact about New Zealand and chances are they’ll likely say, “There are more sheep than people.” It’s true, with 30 million sheep to 4.4 million humans, so it is little wonder that wool production is a major source of export revenue, and national pride, for the country. But the industry is in serious decline. Total wool exports fell 30.2 percent to NZ$367 million ($251.3 million USD) in the year to January 2021, and with wool prices so low it can often cost farmers more to shear sheep than they can get for the wool once sold.
We’re not talking about luxury Merino wool here. That ultrafine fiber still commands a high price, but it makes up only 10 percent of New Zealand wool products. Some 80 percent of New Zealand wool is actually strong wool, a coarser natural fiber more typically used for carpets and rugs.
Changing tastes and the popularity of man-made fibers means there’s a surfeit of strong wool in New Zealand—an estimated 1 million tons is stored waiting for the prices to improve—but 26-year-old inventor Logan Williams, and his company Shear Edge, is hoping to make the most of this increasingly ignored material by chopping it up and using it to make boats, knives, fencing, and just about anything that’s currently made using plastic.
Photograph: Shear Edge
Williams has pioneered a method of adding processed strong wool to polymers, including bio-based PLA (polylactic acid), typically made from corn starch. The result is a material that not only uses less plastic but is lighter and stronger—and, crucially, this wooly plastic can be processed by existing plastic-forming machinery.
“Wool is composed of keratin protein,” explains Williams. “It’s actually one of the strongest natural materials on the planet, so when it gets infused with the polymer it makes it incredibly strong, but also lighter, so the more wool we can put into the polymer the lighter the products will be and less plastic will be needed.”
The pellets, made in Shear Edge’s Hamilton factory, south of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island, can be used as a substitute for plastic manufacturing without having to invest in new machinery. “Our pellets can be universally applied to almost all forms of manufacturing, says Williams. “This includes injection molding, extrusion, rotational molding, and thermoforming. Our customers may only have to slightly change the temperature and torque of their existing machinery, and aside from visible fibers, it looks almost identical to the industry standard.”
Shear Edge’s wool composites have been tested by Scion Research (a New Zealand government-owned company that carries out scientific research for the benefit of the country) to international ISO and ASTM standards, and the results show that wool makes composites lighter and stiffer, with higher impact and tensile strength.
Shear Edge is currently producing 4 tons a day, and Williams hopes that by using strong wool, he can give farmers an income stream for a product that is often considered worthless, especially as they can use parts of the fleece such as bellies, side,s and pieces that would otherwise be thrown away. Currently the company’s formula replaces as much as 35 per cent of the typical base polymer without a reduction in performance. It’s also worth noting that, unlike a material such as glass fiber, it is 100 percent recyclable.
More recycled plastic, glass and paper will be used in everyday products — from trash bags to beer bottles — under a new law Gov. Phil Murphy signed Tuesday.
The law also prohibits the sale of polystyrene packing peanuts in New Jersey within two years — a move supporters say will help keep the easily blown pieces of lightweight plastic out of the litter stream.
“With this new law, more plastic will get recycled, more will get turned into consumer packaging, and less will end up in our oceans, waves, and beaches,” said John Weber, a regional manager for the environmental group Surfrider Foundation.
Plastic pollution has become an increasing problem in New Jersey. More than 80% of litter picked up by volunteers for Clean Ocean Action at annual beach cleanups from Cape May to Sandy Hook has been plastic in recent years.
Murphy previously signed a law that will ban or place constraints on disposable plastic products including drinking straws and carryout bags, as well as polystyrene cups, plates and takeout cartons and other food containers made of the material, often called Styrofoam.
But that law never targeted packing peanuts, whose shock absorption makes for effective shipping filler but whose light weight and inability to biodegrade make it an environmental problem.
Although some businesses and special recycling events accept packing peanuts, much of it ends up in a landfill or incinerator. Few if any New Jersey towns have curbside pickup for packing peanuts because they weigh so little, making them far less valuable as a recycled product, and take up so much room to transport.
The heart of the new law will require manufacturers to incorporate more recycled plastic, glass and paper into containers and bags.
Most plastic containers must have at least 10% to 15% recycled materials within two years. The percentages would increase over the years until such containers contain 50% recycled content.
Most glass containers would be required to contain at least 35% recycled material.
Paper carryout bags sold in New Jersey would be required to have 20% to 40% recycled material depending on their size.
A fiscal analysis by the Office of Legislative Services said the state Department of Environmental Protection would likely have to hire one employee at $80,000 a year to fulfill the requirements of the bill.
Scott Fallon has covered the COVID-19 pandemic since its onset in March 2020. To get unlimited access to the latest news about the pandemic’s impact on New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Author: Charlotte Edmond, Senior Writer, Formative Content
Many plastics end up in the ocean, where they release greenhouse gases as they slowly break down.
Plastic incineration is a significant source of air pollution.
Establishing a circular economy is crucial to better management of plastics.
From bags caught in hedgerows to bottles bobbing in the ocean, the visible signs of our single-use plastic addiction are everywhere. We all know that plastic pollution is a big problem. But what is less talked about is exactly how plastic contributes to global warming.
From the way plastics effect marine environments to how they are disposed of, here’s how they are adding to the climate change problem.
Consumption of plastics is on the rise
Our appetite for plastics is fuelling growing demand for petrochemical products, the International Energy Agency says. Even as we try to curb fossil-fuel use in sectors such as transportation and heating, consumption of plastics will only increase, based on our current trajectory. The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) estimates that if trends continue, plastics will account for 20% of oil consumption by 2050. Plastic
What is the World Economic Forum doing about plastic pollution?
More than 90% of plastic is never recycled, and a whopping 8 million metric tons of plastic waste are dumped into the oceans annually. At this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans by 2050.
The Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP) is a collaboration between businesses, international donors, national and local governments, community groups and world-class experts seeking meaningful actions to beat plastic pollution.
In Ghana, for example, GPAP is working with technology giant SAP to create a group of more than 2,000 waste pickers and measuring the quantities and types of plastic that they collect. This data is then analysed alongside the prices that are paid throughout the value chain by buyers in Ghana and internationally.
It aims to show how businesses, communities and governments can redesign the global “take-make-dispose” economy as a circular one in which products and materials are redesigned, recovered and reused to reduce environmental impacts.
Getting rid of all this plastic also causes problems for the planet. Just 16% of plastics are recycled – the rest goes to landfill for incineration, or is just dumped.
Much of the plastic that doesn’t make it to the recycling plant ends up in our rivers and ocean. Not only is this a danger to the animals and plants whose habitats have become aquatic garbage patches, but it also poses a threat to the climate, as plastic releases greenhouse gases as it slowly breaks down. Sunlight and heat cause it to release methane and ethylene – and at increasing rate as the plastic breaks down into ever smaller pieces.
Numerous single-use plastic items are widespread in our oceans. Image: Statista
On top of this, research suggests that microplastics affect the ability of marine microorganisms to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. At least half of Earth’s oxygen comes from the ocean, mostly produced by plankton. These tiny organisms also capture carbon through photosynthesis, making our ocean a vitally important carbon sink. Microplastics affect the ability of these organisms to grow, reproduce and capture carbon. And by grazing on microplastics, these plankton could further accelerate the loss of ocean oxygen.
This means the pernicious effects of all this plastic on the marine environment are particularly concerning. A plastic-choked and warming ocean will create a negative feedback loop where plant and animal life suffer, less carbon dioxide is absorbed and our ability to rein in climate change is further hampered.
Plastic incineration is also a problem
Open burning of waste is common in many parts of the world and is a major source of air pollution. Burning plastics releases a cocktail of poisonous chemicals that damage the health of the planet and the people exposed to the polluted air. Black carbon is one such serious pollutant – it has a global warming potential up to 5,000 times greater than carbon dioxide.
In 2019, the CIEL estimated that production and incineration of plastic would add 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere – equivalent to 189 coal-fired power plants. By 2050 this could rise to 2.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year – or 615 coal plants’ worth.
A circular economy is a crucial part of the solution
Key to tackling the problem of plastic is establishing a circular economy. Plastic that can’t be eliminated from the system needs to be reusable, recyclable or compostable. This requires significant investment in collection and reprocessing infrastructure. sustainability
What is the World Economic Forum doing about the circular economy?
The World Economic Forum has created a series of initiatives to promote circularity.
1. Scale360° Playbook was designed to build lasting ecosystems for the circular economy and help solutions scale.
Its unique hub-based approach – launched this September – is designed to prioritize circular innovation while fostering communities that allow innovators from around the world to share ideas and solutions. Emerging innovators from around the world can connect and work together ideas and solutions through the UpLink, the Forum’s open innovation platform.
Discover how the Scale360° Playbook can drive circular innovation in your community.
2. A new Circular Cars Initiative (CCI) embodies an ambition for a more circular automotive industry. It represents a coalition of more than 60 automakers, suppliers, research institutions, NGOs and international organizations committed to realizing this near-term ambition.
CCI has recently released a new series of circularity “roadmaps”, developed in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), McKinsey & Co. and Accenture Strategy. These reports explain the specifics of this new circular transition.
3. The World Economic Forum’s Accelerating Digital Traceability for Sustainable Production initiative brings together manufacturers, suppliers, consumers and regulators to jointly establish solutions and provide a supporting ecosystem to increase supply chain visibility and accelerate sustainability and circularity across manufacturing and production sectors.
Compared with business-as-usual, a circular economy could cut the volume of plastics entering our oceans by 80% each year, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It could also generate annual savings of $200 billion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% and create 700,000 net additional jobs by 2040.
Inés Yábar is a sustainability activist and co-founder of Ensemble pour TECHO, an organization seeking to eradicate poverty in South America. She told the World Economic Forum how plastic has become ubiquitous where she lives in Peru. “Since we don’t have running water that you can just drink out of the tap, lots of people are still buying water bottles … people are still using plastic bags, although they’re technically banned.
“[It’s about] not just thinking about plastic in and of itself, but thinking about sustainable consumption and production as a whole, and what that means for our cities, what that means for transport.
“When we think about [plastic] as part of our global consumption model, then we realize that it’s not just about not consuming plastic, but it’s about changing the systems that are in place and making sure that we’re helping the companies, the citizens, the countries in the decisions that they’re making, so that they’re not just doing a small step at the time, but it’s really a holistic change that disrupts our current system.”
Calls are growing for nations to sign an historic global treaty to tackle plastic pollution at a UN Environment Assembly conference due to take place in Nairobi this Spring.
In a new report published this morning, the Environmental Investigation Agency urged officials attending the talks to develop an ambitious international agreement to crackdown on plastic pollution that covers the whole lifecycle of plastics, from production through to waste management.
Dubbed Connecting the Dots: Plastic pollution and the planetary emergency, the report argues that plastic pollution must be treated alongside biodiversity loss and climate change as a planetary emergency. Plastic pollution is set to triple by 2040, it notes, with the weight of plastic in the seas by that date estimated to be on track to exceed that of all the fish in the ocean.
“There is a deadly ticking clock counting swiftly down,” said EIA Ocean Campaigner Tom Gammage. “The damage done by rampant overproduction of virgin plastics and their lifecycle is irreversible – this is a threat to human civilisation and the planet’s basic ability to maintain a habitable environment.”
Discussions about a global pact to cut plastic pollution are expected to dominate the agenda of a UN Environment Assembly 5.2 (UNEA 5.2) conference in April.
While more than two thirds of UN member states have said they support a treaty on plastic pollution, it remains unclear whether any pact will target the production of plastics, an intervention that is like to face major pushback from oil and gas and chemicals firms, as well as countries that export plastic.
The EIA has warned that decision makers attending the conference should move away from a “reductionist litter focus” and instead adopt a full lifecycle approach that tackles all aspects of plastic pollution, from production through to product design and waste management.
The report is published on the same day that more than 70 companies signed an open letter calling for a treaty on plastic pollution that includes “both upstream and downstream policies”.
Among the signatories to the letter are Coca-Cola, Nestle, and PepsiCo, the consumer goods giants that have been identified as the world’s top plastic polluters for three years running by the Break Free From Plastic Campaign.
Other consumer goods brands and retailers to have signed the letter include Mars, P&G, Unilever, Mondelez International, Ikea, Walmart, and Danone, alongside a raft of financial institutions, such as Federated Hermes, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Armundi Asset Management, and Robeco.
“We are at a critical point in time to establish an ambitious UN treaty that fosters collaboration for systemic solutions and speeds up the transition to a circular economy globally,” the letter states. “UNEA 5.2 is the decisive, most auspicious moment to turn the tide on the global plastic pollution crisis. We cannot afford to miss it.”
Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists
Study calls for cap on production and release as pollution threatens global ecosystems upon which life depends
The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.
Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.
The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.
Chemical pollution threatens Earth’s systems by damaging the biological and physical processes that underpin all life. For example, pesticides wipe out many non-target insects, which are fundamental to all ecosystems and, therefore, to the provision of clean air, water and food.
“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”
Dr Sarah Cornell, an associate professor and principal researcher at SRC, said: “For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing. But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”
Some threats have been tackled to a larger extent, the scientists said, such as the CFC chemicals that destroy the ozone layer and its protection from damaging ultraviolet rays.
Determining whether chemical pollution has crossed a planetary boundary is complex because there is no pre-human baseline, unlike with the climate crisis and the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are also a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use – about 350,000 – and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety.
So the research used a combination of measurements to assess the situation. These included the rate of production of chemicals, which is rising rapidly, and their release into the environment, which is happening much faster than the ability of authorities to track or investigate the impacts.
The well-known negative effects of some chemicals, from the extraction of fossil fuels to produce them to their leaking into the environment, were also part of the assessment. The scientists acknowledged the data was limited in many areas, but said the weight of evidence pointed to a breach of the planetary boundary.
“There’s evidence that things are pointing in the wrong direction every step of the way,” said Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth at the University of Gothenburg who was part of the team. “For example, the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals. That to me is a pretty clear indication that we’ve crossed a boundary. We’re in trouble, but there are things we can do to reverse some of this.”
Villarrubia-Gómez said: “Shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused, not wasted.”
The researchers said stronger regulation was needed and in the future a fixed cap on chemical production and release, in the same way carbon targets aim to end greenhouse gas emissions. Their study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology
Prof Sir Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews, who was not part of the study, said: “The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious. Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant.
“Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment.”
The chemical pollution planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed, with the others being global heating, the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.
The proposed pact would include cuts in plastic production, saying that a circular economy for plastics will ‘contribute to the efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss, while bringing positive social and economic impacts’.
There are more than 70 signatories to the statement, including Walmart, Unilever and Nestle.
Later this year, world officials will meet at a United Nations Environment Assembly conference (UNEA 5.2) for negotiations on a treaty to tackle a plastic waste crisis that is choking landfills, despoiling oceans and killing wildlife.
The joint statement said: ‘“We are at a critical point in time to establish an ambitious UN treaty.
“UNEA 5.2 is the decisive, most auspicious moment to turn the tide on the global plastic pollution crisis. We cannot afford to miss it.”
It remains unclear whether any deal will focus on waste management and recycling or take tougher steps such as curbing new plastic production, a move that would likely face resistance from big oil and chemical firms and major plastic-producing countries like the US.
Less than 10% of all the plastic ever made has been recycled.
A Reuters investigation last year revealed that new recycling technologies touted by the plastics industry have struggled to combat the problem.
Meanwhile, production of plastic, which is derived from oil and gas, is projected to double within 20 years.
This is a key source of future revenue for energy companies, as demand for fossil fuels wanes with the rise of renewable energy and electric vehicles.
While scaling-up global recycling is critical to tackling plastic waste, these efforts will not prevent plastic pollution from continuing to skyrocket without constraints on production, a landmark 2020 study by Pew Charitable Trusts found.
Last year, a new study showed that plastic has a far worse carbon footprint than previously believed.
The problem is that plastic is often made in coal-based newly industrialised countries such as China, India, Indonesia and South Africa.
The energy and process heat for the production of plastics in these countries comes primarily from the combustion of coal.
The researchers say that the global carbon footprint of plastics has doubled since 1995, reaching 2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) in 2015.
This represents more than 4.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is more than previously thought.
Over the same period, the global health footprint of plastics from fine particulate air pollution has increased by 70%, causing approximately 2.2 million disability-adjusted life years
The researchers looked at the greenhouse gas emissions generated across the life cycle of plastics – from fossil resource extraction, to processing into product classes and use, through to end of life, including recycling, incineration and landfill.
The production phase of plastics is responsible for the vast majority – 96% – of the carbon footprint of plastics.
Livia Cabernard, a doctoral student at the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) at ETH Zurich, said: “So far, the simplistic assumption has been that the production of plastic requires roughly the same amount of fossil fuel as is contained in the raw materials in plastic — above all petroleum.”
“The plastics-related carbon footprint of China’s transport sector, Indonesia’s electronics industry and India’s construction industry has increased more than 50-fold since 1995.”
“Even in a worst-case scenario in which all plastics are incinerated, their production accounts for the lion’s share of total greenhouse gas and particulate matter emissions.”
Watch: Nigerian art installation finds beauty in plastic pollution
Unsure if something can actually be recycled? Putting it in your recycling bin anyway might be worse for the environment than just tossing it in the trash.
[Source Image: JakeOlimb/Getty Images]
By JESSICA HEIGES AND KATE O’NEILL 2 minute Read
Wishcycling is putting something in the recycling bin and hoping it will be recycled, even if there is little evidence to confirm this assumption.
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Hope is central to wishcycling. People may not be sure the system works, but they choose to believe that if they recycle an object, it will become a new product rather than being buried in a landfill, burned, or dumped.
The U.S. recycling industry was launched in the 1970s in response to public concern over litter and waste. The growth of recycling and collection programs changed consumers’ view of waste: It didn’t seem entirely bad if it could lead to the creation of new products via recycling.
Pro-recycling messaging from governments, corporations, and environmentalists promoted and reinforced recycling behavior. This was especially true for plastics that had resin identification codes inside a triangle of “chasing arrows,” indicating that the item was recyclable—even though that was usually far from the truth. In fact, only resins #1 (polyethylene terephthalate, or PET) and #2 (high-density polyethylene, or HDPE) are relatively easy to recycle and have viable markets. The others are hard to recycle, so some jurisdictions don’t even collect them.
The China scrap restrictions created enormous waste backups in the U.S., where governments had underinvested in recycling systems. Consumers saw that recycling was not as reliable or environmentally friendly as previously believed.
Contaminating the waste stream with material that is not actually recyclable makes the sorting process more costly because it requires extra labor. Wishcycling also damages sorting systems and equipment and depresses an already fragile trading market.
Huge waste management companies and small cities and towns have launched educational campaigns on this issue. Their mantra is “When in doubt, throw it out.” In other words, only place material that truly can be recycled in your bin. This message is hard for many environmentalists to hear, but it cuts costs for recyclers and local governments.
