Gary Flook served in the Air Force for 37 years, as a firefighter at the now-closed Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and the former Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana, where he regularly trained with aqueous film forming foam, or AFFF—a frothy white fire retardant that is highly effective but now known to be toxic.

Flook volunteered at his local fire department, where he also used the foam, unaware of the health risks it posed. In 2000, at age 45, he received devastating news: He had testicular cancer, which would require an orchiectomy followed by chemotherapy.

Hundreds of lawsuits, including one by Flook, have been filed against companies that make firefighting products and the chemicals used in them.

And multiple studies show that firefighters, both military and civilian, have been diagnosed with testicular cancer at higher rates than people in most other occupations, often pointing to the presence of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in the foam.

But the link between PFAS and testicular cancer among service members was never directly proven — until now.

A new federal study for the first time shows a direct association between PFOS, a PFAS chemical, found in the blood of thousands of military personnel and testicular cancer.

Using banked blood drawn from Air Force servicemen, researchers at the National Cancer Institute and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences found strong evidence that airmen who were firefighters had elevated levels of PFAS in their bloodstreams and weaker evidence for those who lived on installations with high levels of PFAS in the drinking water. And the airmen with testicular cancer had higher serum levels of PFOS than those who had not been diagnosed with cancer, said study co-author Mark Purdue, a senior investigator at NCI.

“To my knowledge,” Purdue said, “this is the first study to measure PFAS levels in the U.S. military population and to investigate associations with a cancer endpoint in this population, so that brings new evidence to the table.”

In a commentary in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, Kyle Steenland, a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, said the research “provides a valuable contribution to the literature,” which he described as “rather sparse” in demonstrating a link between PFAS and testicular cancer.

More studies are needed, he said, “as is always the case for environmental chemicals.”

Not ‘Just Soap and Water’

Old stocks of AFFF that contained PFOS were replaced in the past few decades by foam that contains newer-generation PFAS, which now also are known to be toxic. By congressional order, the Department of Defense must stop using all PFAS-containing foams by October 2024, though it can keep buying them until this October. That’s decades after the military first documented the chemicals’ potential health concerns.

A DoD study in 1974 found that PFAS was fatal to fish. By 1983, an Air Force technical report showed its deadly effects on mice.

But given its effectiveness in fighting extremely hot fires, like aircraft crashes and shipboard blazes, the Defense Department still uses it in operations. Rarely, if ever, had the military warned of its dangers, according to Kevin Ferrara, a retired Air Force firefighter, as well as several military firefighters who contacted KFF Health News.

“We were told that it was just soap and water, completely harmless,” Ferrara said. “We were completely slathered in the foam — hands, mouth, eyes. It looked just like if you were going to fill up your sink with dish soap.”

Photos released by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service in 2013 show personnel working in the foam without protective gear. The description calls the “small sea of fire retardant foam” at Travis Air Force Base in California “non-hazardous” and “similar to soap.”

“No people or aircraft were harmed in the incident,” it reads.

There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, invented in the 1940s to ward off stains and prevent sticking in industrial and household goods. Along with foam used for decades by firefighters and the military, the chemicals are in makeup, nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing, rugs, food wrappers, and a myriad of other consumer goods.

Known as “forever chemicals,” they do not break down in the environment and do accumulate in the human body. Researchers estimate that nearly all Americans have PFAS in their blood, exposed primarily by groundwater, drinking water, soil, and foods. A recent U.S. Geological Survey study estimated that at least 45% of U.S. tap water has at least one type of forever chemical from both private wells and public water supplies.

Health and environmental concerns associated with the chemicals have spurred a cascade of lawsuits, plus state and federal legislation that targets the manufacturers and sellers of PFAS-laden products. Gary Flook is suing 3M and associated companies that manufactured PFAS and the firefighting foam, including DuPont and Kidde-Fenwal.

Congress has prodded the Department of Defense to clean up military sites and take related health concerns more seriously, funding site inspections for PFAS and mandating blood testing for military firefighters. Advocates argue those actions are not enough.

“How long has [DoD] spent on this issue without any real results except for putting some filters on drinking water?” said Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group. “When it comes to cleaning up the problem, we are in the same place we were years ago.”

On a Mission to Get Screening

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not recommend blood testing for PFAS, stating on its website that “blood tests cannot be linked to current or future health conditions or guide medical treatment decisions.”

But that could change soon. Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), co-chair of the congressional PFAS Task Force, in June introduced the Veterans Exposed to Toxic PFAS Act, which would require the VA to treat conditions linked to exposure and provide disability benefits for those affected, including for testicular cancer.

“The last thing [veterans] and their families need to go through is to fight with VA to get access to benefits we promised them when they put that uniform on,” Kildee said.

Evidence is strong that exposure to PFAS is associated with health effects such as decreased response to vaccines, kidney cancer, and low birth weight, according to an expansive, federally funded report published last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The nonprofit institution recommended blood testing for communities with high exposure to PFAS, followed by health screenings for those above certain levels.

It also said that, based on limited evidence, there is “moderate confidence” of an association between exposure and thyroid dysfunction, preeclampsia in pregnant women, and breast and testicular cancers.

The new study of Air Force servicemen published July 17 goes further, linking PFAS exposure directly to testicular germ cell tumors, which make up roughly 95% of testicular cancer cases.

Testicular cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among young adult men. It is also the type of cancer diagnosed at the highest rate among active military personnel, most of whom are male, ages 18 to 40, and in peak physical condition.

That age distribution and knowing AFFF was a source of PFAS contamination drove Purdue and USUHS researcher Jennifer Rusiecki to investigate a possible connection.

Using samples from the Department of Defense Serum Repository, a biobank of more than 62 million blood serum specimens from service members, the researchers examined samples from 530 troops who later developed testicular cancer and those of 530 members of a control group. The blood had been collected between 1988 and 2017.

A second sampling collected four years after the first samples were taken showed the higher PFOS concentrations positively associated with testicular cancer.

Ferrara does not have testicular cancer, though he does have other health concerns he attributes to PFAS, and he worries for himself and his fellow firefighters. He recalled working at Air Combat Command headquarters at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia in the early 2010s and seeing emails mentioning two types of PFAS chemicals: PFOS and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA.

But employees on the base remained largely unfamiliar with the jumble of acronyms, Ferrara said.

Even as the evidence grew that the chemicals in AFFF were toxic, “we were still led to believe that it’s perfectly safe,” Ferrara said. “They kept putting out vague and cryptic messages, citing environmental concerns.”

When Ferrara was working a desk job at Air Combat Command and no longer fighting fires, his exposure likely continued: Joint Base Langley-Eustis is among the top five most PFAS-contaminated military sites, according to the EWG, with groundwater at the former Langley Air Force Base registering 2.2 million parts per trillion for PFOS and PFOA.

According to the EPA, just 40 parts per trillion would “warrant further attention,” such as testing and amelioration.

The Defense Department did not provide comment on the new study.

Air Force officials told KFF Health News that the service has swapped products and no longer allows uncontrolled discharges of firefighting foam for maintenance, testing, or training.

“The Department of the Air Force has replaced Aqueous Film Forming Foam, which contained PFAS, with a foam that meets Environmental Protection Agency recommendations at all installations,” the Air Force said in a statement provided to KFF Health News.

Both older-generation forever chemicals are no longer made in the U.S. 3M, the main manufacturer of PFOS, agreed to start phasing it out in 2000. In June, the industrial giant announced it would pay at least $10.3 billion to settle a class-action suit.

Alarmed over what it perceived as the Defense Department’s unwillingness to address PFAS contamination or stop using AFFF, Congress in 2019 ordered DoD to offer annual testing for all active-duty military firefighters and banned the use of PFAS foam by 2024.

According to data provided by DoD, among more than 9,000 firefighters who requested the tests in fiscal year 2021, 96% had at least one of two types of PFAS in their blood serum, with PFOS being the most commonly detected at an average level of 3.1 nanograms per milliliter.

Readings between 2 and 20 ng/mL carry concern for adverse effects, according to the national academies. In that range, it recommends people limit additional exposure and screen for high cholesterol, breast cancer, and, if pregnant, high blood pressure.

According to DoD, 707 active and former defense sites are contaminated with PFAS or have had suspected PFAS discharges. The department is in the early stages of a decades-long testing and cleaning process.

More than 3,300 lawsuits have been filed over AFFF and PFAS contamination; beyond 3M’s massive settlement, DuPont and other manufacturers reached a $1.185 billion agreement with water utility companies in June.

Attorneys general from 22 states have urged the court to reject the 3M settlement, saying in a filing July 26 it would not adequately cover the damage caused.

For now, many firefighters, like Ferrara, live with anxiety that their blood PFAS levels may lead to cancer. Flook declined to speak to KFF Health News because he is part of the 3M class-action lawsuit. The cancer wreaked havoc on his marriage, robbing him and his wife, Linda, of “affection, assistance, and conjugal fellowship,” according to the lawsuit.

Congress is again trying to push the Pentagon. This year, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) reintroduced the PFAS Exposure Assessment and Documentation Act, which would require DoD to test all service members — not just firefighters — stationed at installations with known or suspected contamination as part of their annual health checkups as well as family members and veterans.

The tests, which aren’t covered by the military health program or most insurers, typically cost from $400 to $600.

In June, Kildee said veterans have been stymied in getting assistance with exposure-related illnesses that include PFAS.

“For too long, the federal government has been too slow to act to deal with the threat posed by PFAS exposure,” Kildee said. “This situation is completely unacceptable.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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After years of criticism for its outsize use of plastic, the world’s largest retailer appears to be making progress to reduce its plastic footprint.

Amazon announced in its latest sustainability report on Tuesday that orders shipped from its fulfillment centers used 85,916 metric tons of single-use plastic in 2022—an 11.6 percent decrease from the amount used in 2021.

The company attributed this decline to its expanded use of paper-based packaging, as well as an increased effort to ship items in their original containers—without adding any Amazon-branded packaging. Amazon has also stopped using nonrecyclable bags made of mixed materials, and on Tuesday it said it was “phasing out” padded plastic mailers—those ubiquitous blue and white envelopes studded with the Amazon logo—in favor of “recyclable alternatives.”

Eliminating padded plastic mailers is a “big, big deal,” said Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president for strategic initiatives for the nonprofit Oceana, although he called on the company to set a concrete timeline for doing so. He called Amazon’s sustainability report “good news for the oceans,” since plastic film like the kind used in Amazon’s packaging is one of the most common forms of marine plastic litter and is the deadliest type of plastic to marine animals. 

Plastics have other impacts, too: They’re made of fossil fuels and are a major source of climate pollution, and they cause toxic chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle. Meanwhile, the U.S. recycling rate for plastics is just 5 percent, meaning the vast majority of plastics are littered, burned, or sent to a landfill.

Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report is the first to include a quantitative estimate of the company’s single-use plastics footprint; previously, the company’s only other estimate came from a blog post last December. Before that, organizations like Oceana had to publish their own estimates and had called for greater transparency—sometimes through investor pressure. Over the past three years, shareholder advocacy groups have repeatedly filed resolutions demanding that Amazon disclose the amount of plastic it uses and reduce it by one-third by 2030. One resolution, co-filed in December 2021 by Green Century Capital Management and As You Sow, was supported by nearly half of Amazon shareholders.

Now, environmental advocates say Amazon appears to be on the right path—in contrast to many other major plastic users. Even companies that have signed onto a prominent pledge to reduce virgin plastic use have moved in the wrong direction: Over the past several years, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mars, and many others have reported an increase in the weight of their virgin plastic packaging.

Still, the 86,000 metric tons of plastic used in Amazon fulfillment centers is a lot, and Douglass Guernsey, a shareholder advocate for Green Century Capital Management, said Amazon must move much faster to replace other types of plastic packaging—like non-padded plastic mailers—with reusable alternatives or packaging made from recycled paper. He called for third-party verification of Amazon’s single-use plastic reductions, and for the company to disclose more information about its plastics use: “What type of plastic is Amazon using?” Guernsey asked. “How much is designed to be recyclable?”

Guernsey also criticized Amazon for failing to make a forward-looking, time-bound commitment to reduce its plastics use. “I would like them to make a statement saying, ‘We’re phasing out single-use plastic. We’re Amazon, we can do that,’” he said. 

Littlejohn said Amazon should ensure that its plastic reductions manifest throughout the company’s supply chains. Although the numbers cited in Amazon’s 2022 sustainability report likely apply to the majority of Amazon orders—those shipped from the company’s fulfillment centers—they don’t cover those that are shipped from third-party sellers’ doorsteps. Amazon doesn’t disclose what fraction of its sales are shipped from third-party sellers.

Amazon declined to respond to a series of questions about its plastic use, but a spokesperson for the company said they “continue to prioritize materials that are recyclable and to find alternatives to plastic.” The spokesperson noted some of Amazon’s previously published progress, including the elimination of single-use plastic air pillows in Europe and Australia. 

Both Guernsey and Littlejohn vowed to keep campaigning for stronger action from Amazon. “Investors care about this,” Guernsey said. “The shareholder process has been incredibly important … and we’re going to continue to use it to pressure the company to reduce its environmental footprint.” 

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/after-years-of-criticism-amazon-appears-to-be-cutting-down-on-plastics/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Incorporating plastic waste into asphalt pavement and other types of infrastructure projects shows some limited promise, according to a new report published Tuesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

But those efforts are hampered by an American recycling system that lacks clear economic and environmental goals and suffers from a dearth of scientific and engineering information, the chairman of the research committee said Monday.

“As we got into this, one question that came up to the committee is, ‘What problem are we trying to solve?,’” said David Dzombak, who chaired a panel of 12 experts tasked by Congress to look into ways to recycle plastic waste into roads, railroad ties, drainage pipes, utility poles and other common types of infrastructure applications. “Are we trying to keep (plastic waste) out of landfills? Or reduce litter or leakage into the environment that ends up in the ocean or along roads and rivers? Are we trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

“Determining exactly which pathways to pursue, however, depends on goals, policy, and economics,” he said. “A coordinated direction for policy and research is key for advancement of plastics recycling in the U.S.”

The committee members included consultants, academic researchers and various state transportation officials. They looked into plastic recycling in infrastructure applications such as asphalt pavement mixes, drainage pipes, railroad ties, bike paths, composite utility poles and highway sound barriers. A range of factors inhibit their adoption, however, such as uncertainties over how to make the infrastructure components with recycled plastic and “unknowns regarding environmental impacts―including the potential release of microplastics―and effects on long-term performance.”

The report comes amid a growing awareness in the United States and throughout the world of a global plastics crisis, and as 175 nations have agreed to find a way by the end of next year to stop future plastic production from choking ocean and land ecosystems and clean up legacy plastic pollution.

The United Nations Environment Program in May reported that the world produces 430 million metric tons of plastics each year, of which over two-thirds are short-lived products that soon become waste. Plastic production is set to triple by 2060 under a “business-as-usual” scenario.

Two years ago, a different committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine found that in 2016, the United States led the world in the generation of plastic waste at 287 pounds per person and needed a comprehensive strategy to curb the waste’s devastating impact on ocean health, marine wildlife and communities.

EPA has said the U.S. recycling rate of plastic is 8 percent; others have estimated it to be even lower.

The lack of national direction, Dzombak said, stems in part from the fact that the United States has no national recycling law. Recycling, according to the committee’s 407-page report, lacks coordination between public and private sectors, with recycling policies varying from state to state. Research and development into the capture, processing and reuse of plastic products and materials is also not very advanced in the United States, the report concluded.

But the report also found that it is in society’s interests to expand and standardize plastics waste collection, increase recycling and explore new applications for plastics waste in infrastructure, even as it outlined potential risks to public health and the environment by doing so.

“There is isolated activity that is very promising that is reusing recycled plastics, so there is reason for optimism here, if we can share more data and information,” said Dzombak, the Hamerschlag University Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

One economic segment the committee examined and found to successfully reuse waste plastic was the manufacturing of drainage pipes. But beyond that, the committee found little success, despite decades of attempts, according to the report.

As a result, he said, “it is unclear how much of a solution” integrating plastic waste into infrastructure  applications will be to help solve the plastic waste problem.

The report found the most promise with the recycling of plastic waste from manufacturing processes, and said those plastics are in high demand. Unlike the mixed plastic waste people dump in recycling bins, post-manufacturing waste is more uniform in its chemical make-up and clean, making it easier to recycle. 

Mixed plastic waste that people toss in their recycling bins consist of many different kinds of plastic, made with many different chemicals, and as a result are harder to recycle. This post-consumer waste can also be contaminated with other kinds of waste products or chemicals.

The report focused mostly on what’s called mechanical methods of recycling of plastic, involving cleaning, sorting and shredding of plastics before they are molded or added into new products. It also noted new industry investment in processes that seek to break down waste plastic into chemical feedstocks, often called “chemical” or “advanced” recycling, including a process called pyrolysis, but said its environmental benefits were “considerably lower than for mechanical recycling and may even be worse than the status quo.”

Turning products like old bottles, bags or yogurt tubs into a material that goes into asphalt has not been tested extensively, for performance or environmental risks, the report found. It may not hold up as well under the wear and tear of cars and trucks, and some research has found it could increase the spread of dangerous microplastics as the road surface breaks down, the report observed.

Judith Enck, founder and president of the environmental group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, said she has her doubts about whether plastics can be effectively recycled into roads or other infrastructure applications.

“While I appreciate work to try to make the best of a bad situation there are a number of serious problems with these attempted solutions to the growing problem of plastic pollution,” Enck said. “Perhaps the most significant is abrasion causing the release of microplastics into the air and water. I don’t see this as a viable solution to the plastics problem.” 

The health and environmental implications of microplastics have become a focus of intense research as scientists have found them throughout the world and inside human bodies. In May, research out of the United Kingdom found that even the process of mechanical recycling can produce a lot of microplastics.

The new national academies report recommended the Department of Transportation conduct field-testing to assess the environmental and health impacts, overall service life and effects of plastics additives on the use and recyclability of asphalt pavements. It further recommended that EPA support research and data collection required to understand and evaluate the potential environmental, human health, economic and performance implications of each new use of recycled plastics.

“Given the limited supplies of recycled plastics having the requisite properties and quality for infrastructure applications, it will be important, from a societal standpoint, to understand the full economic and environmental benefits and costs of candidate applications to make best use of these sup- plies,” the report concluded. “Ideally, this understanding will be informed by assessments made on a life-cycle basis that take into account the stream of benefits and costs associated with the complete product life, including manufacturing, installation, maintenance, service life, and end-of-life management.”

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Before the heat of the day set in, dozens of people were already gathered under a large banyan tree at the twice-weekly turmeric market in Ataikula, Bangladesh. The season for harvesting turmeric was quickly coming to an end. Those who had arrived watched from the shade as other farmers brought their haul on motorbikes and auto rickshaws on the dirt road, their harvests to be combined in large piles atop orange and blue tarpaulin mats. Traders would buy however much they wanted in bulk.

Mohammad Abdullah Sheikh wandered around the market helping farmers weigh their sacks and traders make their purchases. Over the last 30 years, he’s become well acquainted with the space, as his turmeric processing business and trading facilities are headquartered next door. He buys most of his turmeric from this market and processes it to sell to larger food manufacturers and wholesalers across the country.

For most of his turmeric trading career, Sheikh engaged in an open secret: While processing raw turmeric to powder, he added a chemical called lead chromate to get the tubers to glow yellow. Sheikh and the locals refer to the compound as peuri — and nearly all the farmers and traders at the market are familiar with it. Lead chromate is a chemical used in paints to, for instance, make school buses yellow, and it can enhance the radiance of turmeric roots, making them more attractive to buyers.

For decades, Sheikh didn’t know the exact harm that peuri could cause. That changed in the fall of 2019, when researchers from the nonprofit International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, or ICDDR,B, traveled to Ataikula and adjacent districts in the northwest to meet with Sheikh and others in the turmeric business. The researchers warned them that consuming lead chromate could lead to kidney and brain damage or cause developmental delays in children. By that point, the spice had made its way out of the country: The problem had already gone global.

That outreach was the culmination of years of work conducted by an international group of researchers, including a research scientist at Stanford University. They worked together with the ICDDR,B and Bangladesh’s Food Safety Authority to protect the country’s food supply from further lead exposure. The impacts of this intervention were significant, and summarized in a study published recently in the science journal Environmental Research. When researchers sampled and tested turmeric across the country before and after the intervention, the level of adulteration in this one study dropped from 47 percent to 0 percent.

The use of peuri in turmeric renders the food fraudulent, as it is done purposefully to alter the commodity for economic gain. Instances of food fraud are notoriously difficult to resolve, said Michael Roberts, expert on the regulation of food fraud, and executive director of the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Often, the economic incentives just aren’t there for authentically made food. Processors are likely to increase their margins if they cheat.

Fighting food fraud isn’t easy, and experts have a range of ideas on how to do it. Some approaches rely heavily on scientific testing while others work through undercover investigations. Regardless of the method, rooting out food fraud requires constant surveillance across long and complex supply chains. In this sense, Bangladesh’s success is noteworthy, said Roberts, who was not involved in the project to eliminate lead chromate from turmeric. “It’s unusual that this kind of campaign takes place, whether in developed or developing countries,” he said, and there are lessons from this case study that could be applied to other commodities.

Native to South Asia, turmeric has been used for thousands of years as both a culinary and a medicinal ingredient. In Bangladesh, it is often planted in the middle of the year, and requires nine to 10 months to mature before it’s harvested. Precipitation during the monsoon season is critical: A generous amount of rain will allow for the root to bloom, shooting off additional roots, known as “fingers,” from the bulb.

Eskandar Molla, a farmer from northwest Bangladesh, has been growing turmeric for over 50 years. He sells his fresh turmeric fingers at nearby Hazir Hat, an open air market. There, he gets paid a market rate for what he sells: In March of this year, it was around 1,400 taka (about $13 USD) for a 88-pound satchel. Middlemen, who have the facilities to boil and dry the root, buy it from him and other farmers.

Getting the moisture out is critical for the root to be pulsed into powder. Traders lay out a single layer of turmeric fingers in vast, sunny, open fields for a month. Workers manually go through and inspect for roots that are either too long, too fat, or too skinny.

Once dried, the turmeric fingers are polished. Here, they are dumped into large “drums,” which are turned by hand or motorized. This continual physical agitation removes the outer skin of the turmeric to reveal the true color of the root. It’s in this step that lead chromate would be used to enhance color. Once polished, the roots are then ground to a fine golden powder.

In the northwest districts around Ataikula, farmers often talk about a large flood in 1988 that damaged the crop and darkened the color of the roots. To cope with a bad turmeric growing season, Bangladeshi businesses began importing the spice from India. Meanwhile, to remain competitive, Bangladeshi processors started using peuri to disguise the color of the water-damaged crop. The practice of adulteration became more common after the flood.

Sheikh, the trader from Ataikula, recalls being enthralled by the golden glow of the turmeric that he saw at a market in the early 1990s. When he asked the traders about it, they told him to go to India to learn to add peuri during processing. Sheikh followed their advice. When he returned home and brought his haul to the market, he earned more when selling turmeric polished with peuri. “Sometimes,” he said, “wholesalers were not willing to buy if there was no chemical in it.”

Over the past decade, turmeric’s popularity has expanded widely, becoming something of a global trend. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow helped boost turmeric’s stardom by popularizing the spice-infused golden latte on Instagram. The supplement industry sells an array of turmeric products used to curb inflammation and purportedly protect against high cholesterol and heart disease. And scientists are studying the plant for chemicals that might help treat cancer and other challenging medical conditions.

But hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide may have unknowingly purchased a contaminated product.

Lead chromate is comprised of two heavy metals, lead and chromium. The risks of lead consumption are well documented. Continual exposure can cause developmental and neurological issues in children, who absorb four to five times as much lead as adults. In adults, repeated lead exposure is linked to high blood pressure, as well as kidney and reproductive issues. Over time, lead can get integrated into bones because the body mistakes it for calcium, owing to similar chemical properties. There is no known safe level of lead consumption.

The chromium in lead chromate poses a health risk, too. It exists in a chemical form that’s known to be cancerous. It can also cause allergic reactions, respiratory issues, and kidney damage.

The use of peuri in turmeric is just one of many examples of food fraud. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, food fraud affects at least 1 percent of the global food industry and costs as much as $40 billion a year. Cheaper oils have been blended into products labeled 100 percent extra virgin olive oil, and some companies have added low-cost cellulose to grated cheese. Sometimes the fraud poses a safety issue. Baby formula and pet food manufacturers have had to recall products containing melamine that caused kidney failure. And spice producers have sold cumin with peanut powder as filler, putting individuals with peanut allergies at risk of anaphylactic shock.

The FDA began sounding the alarm about turmeric around 2011. In April of that year, Archer Farms recalled its turmeric, which was sold nationwide at Target and Top Food stores, for having high levels of lead. In 2013, continued surveillance and testing by food safety inspectors at the New York State Department of Health identified lead in turmeric sold by Pran, a Bangladeshi company. Since then, the FDA has issued more than a dozen alerts for turmeric products from South Asia for high lead content.

These recalls notwithstanding, turmeric purchased in the United States tends to have lower levels of lead, said Paromita Hore, the director of environmental exposure assessment and education in New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She coauthored a study that tested nearly 1,500 samples of spice products. The turmeric purchased abroad — in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Morocco — had the highest lead concentrations, meaning that people all over the world could have been affected. This disparity, the study explained, may have been due to the adulteration of spices in countries with poor regulatory control.

Families in the U.S. were affected, too, through the informal movement of spices that happens when they visit their home countries and bring products back to the U.S. This practice circumvents the regulations in place for commercially imported foods.

Studies conducted in Boston, New York City, North Carolina, Colorado, and Washington have all found a connection between consumption of lead-tainted turmeric (mostly procured from markets overseas) and elevated blood-lead levels. Still, it’s challenging to calculate exactly how much lead in spices is problematic for human consumption.

For years, the only food in which the FDA had established a maximum level of lead was candy: 0.1 parts per million for small children. It took the agency about 16 years to announce another update, outlining guidelines for other foods commonly consumed by babies and young children. Fruits, the agency said, should not exceed 10 parts per billion in lead, and root vegetables and dried cereals should not exceed 20 parts per billion. This guideline did not discuss spices, and no maximum limits for lead are noted for adults.

Many of the lead levels detected in turmeric have ranged from 28 to 146 parts per million, magnitudes more than the FDA’s established acceptable levels for other foods. (The FDA said in a statement that even though it monitors levels of lead in food, and knows about the turmeric recalls owing to high lead levels, it has not yet set a limit for lead in spices.)

Tom Tarantelli, the New York Department of Agriculture and Market’s former senior food chemist, has estimated that children in families that use turmeric regularly could be consuming 10g a day of that spice alone, suggesting that these kids are consuming far more spice than, say, candy. Public health surveys in Colorado have detected blood lead levels of over 24 mcg/dL — equivalent to about 630 grains of sand in a filled bathtub — in children of families who regularly consumed spices high in lead.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services requires that children on Medicaid get tested for lead at ages one and two. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the same for those not on the government program but who are at risk for exposure, but this doesn’t always happen, and turmeric-induced lead poisoning might be under-diagnosed, said Jessica Ivers, a general pediatrician at The Polyclinic in Seattle, Washington. She recently tested a patient who had immigrated to the U.S. in 2019 and was exhibiting developmental delays. “Lo and behold,” the lead level was high, she said. And the culprit? The turmeric powder that the family had brought back to the U.S. from India.

In a period of 18 months, in her small practice of at most 2,000 kids, Ivers said she had three cases of elevated lead, all in families from India and all related to the consumption of spices. “If the prevalence is three in 2,000,” she added, physicians are missing a lot of cases.

Jenna Forsyth knew nothing about the practice of adding lead chromate to turmeric in 2014, when she started her Ph.D. in environment and resources at Stanford University. Excited to continue her masters research on water and sanitation, she sought out working with Stephen Luby, a world expert on the subject. When she arrived, Luby instead pointed Forsyth to a conundrum he was encountering in his work in Bangladesh: In a rural part of the country, pregnant women and children had high levels of lead in their blood. There were none of the usual suspects of lead exposure. There were no nearby battery recycling plants and families didn’t paint their homes. How could this be?

Forsyth and her Bangladeshi colleagues had a slew of hypotheses. Maybe the lead was coming from jewelry or food storage containers. Or perhaps it came from clay, soil, or ash that the mothers were exposed to during pregnancy. Rice was another possibility, as the staple crop could have absorbed lead from the soil. Forsyth and her colleagues sampled and tested all of these. She vividly remembers the first summer of her Ph.D., as she baked and ground rice into a pulp to test for lead in a sweltering laboratory in rural Bangladesh. But there was no obvious red flag.

Forsyth also scoured the literature and eventually discovered a study published in 2014. A team that included researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health had reported that contaminated turmeric was contributing to elevated lead levels in children in rural Bangladesh. This was intriguing, Forsyth thought, as the families she was working with were growing their own food, but not their own spices. She went back to the homes she had sampled from earlier. Seventeen out of 20 gave her samples of turmeric — and that’s when Forsyth found the culprit.

When she showed Luby her results, he was skeptical and encouraged her to gather more data. So Forsyth and her colleagues used a method called isotopic analysis, which uses chemical clues to definitively determine the source of lead. When they compared the isotopes of lead in the blood to those from other possible contaminants, the isotopes most closely matched that of turmeric.

In 2017, on the heels of this discovery, Forsyth and her Bangladeshi collaborators at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh, met with government officials from Bangladesh’s Department of Agricultural Authority to understand how turmeric was produced and distributed. From these conversations, and from conversations with others in the industry, they identified nine regions of Bangladesh, eight of which contribute almost half of the nation’s turmeric for domestic use and export.

The research team then interviewed turmeric producers and food safety inspectors in each district. They also collected samples of pigments and turmeric — powdered, polished, unpolished, labeled, unlabeled. In 140 turmeric samples collected nationwide, Forsyth and her colleagues found that lead concentrations were highest for polished bulbs and for some turmeric powders, with two samples of powdered turmeric exceeding the country’s limit for lead in turmeric powder, at 8.4 ppm and 26.6 ppm. (At the time of the study, the limit was 2.5 ppm; it has since been raised to 5 ppm.)

They visited mills, and sometimes found sacks of the pigment on-site. They sampled dust from the polishing machine and from the floors of the mill. If there was about one part of lead to chromium, it was a dead giveaway that the adulterant was being used. From interviews, they also understood the motive: Brighter roots led to more profit, and adulterating with a consistently bright paint agent could disguise poorer-quality roots. The findings from this study were published in 2019.

The team held a meeting with the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority. The agency’s chairman at the time, Syeda Sarwar Jahan, was immediately concerned. She decided to spearhead a massive public information campaign.

Local and international news outlets disseminated the findings from Forsyth’s new studies to create public awareness. The researchers met with businesses to make them aware of the risks of lead in turmeric. BFSA posted notices in the nation’s largest wholesale spice market, Shyambazar. The flyers warned people of the dangers of lead and that anyone caught selling turmeric adulterated with lead would be subject to legal action.

Authorities also raided Shyambazar using a machine called an X-ray fluorescence analyzer which can quickly detect lead in spices. Nearly 2,000 pounds of turmeric was seized in the raid and two wholesalers were fined 800,000 taka, more than $9,000 USD.

A few months later, the team went back again to collect samples to see how their intervention had fared. Only about 5 percent of 157 samples were found to be adulterated with lead chromate, down from nearly 50 percent before. When the researchers conducted a sampling spree again in 2021, they found that the use of lead chromate had practically disappeared.

On a rainy Sunday morning in March, Shyambazar was already bustling. Vendors selling eggplant, garlic, onion, greens, and fruits lined the side of the market facing the Buriganga River, which connects the capital city to the rest of the country by an intricate path of waterways. Other vendors were offloading truckloads of pineapple, as rickshaws, motorbikes, and cars drove neck-to-neck, negotiating for space along the road.

Narrow passageways connect the bustling vegetable market to its interior, where dried goods, including spices, are found. The fragrant, sharp scents of chili, cumin, and turmeric travel down the slick, narrow walkways as wholesalers and buyers maneuver about with large burlap sacks atop their heads.

Many of the turmeric wholesalers selling in Shyambazar have been at it for more than 30 years. Law enforcement, they said, had only showed up for the turmeric. No other spices, they noted, have ever come under scrutiny.

In late 2019, as part of the intervention against lead chromate use in turmeric, the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority printed and distributed an estimated 50,000 copies of green flyers, that they shared with traders and plastered around the market. Be skeptical of fingers that appear too bright and yellow, it advised, and if the yellow dusting from turmeric doesn’t come off easily, it’s likely you’ve been played.

Most of those flyers are now gone. One trader, Mohammad Mosharof Khokon, who has been selling turmeric for over 30 years, kept a copy under the glass top of his desk. At the time of the raid, he was compliant, albeit nervous for the researchers to scan his satchels of spice. “The machine could show some error,” he said about the XRF, “and then I would lose my business.” Despite the uncertainty of when authorities could show up again, Khokon said that the enforcement is a good thing: “It ensures the quality and purity of the product.”

Shoraf Ali Biswash was one of the traders who had turmeric from his warehouse seized during the raid and paid a fine of 400,000 taka (approximately $3,700). For him, selling turmeric is a family affair: His brother has a polishing mill near Pabna and for years, used peuri to polish the roots that Biswash then sold. Despite the fine, Biswash believes the increased surveillance is also for the best. “It’s 100 percent good because the chemical was bad for our health,” he said. At home, he was feeding his family turmeric polished with lead chromate and immediately stopped once he learned the health effects.

The crackdown on turmeric in 2019 may, in part, explain why the use of lead chromate in polishing turmeric has since decreased. It was a punishable crime, and although there was only one raid, people now know there’s a risk of getting caught. This spring, Undark collected three samples of polished turmeric fingers from Shyambazar and brought them back to get tested at NVL Labs, a Seattle-based company that tests for environmental contaminants including lead. In this admittedly small sample, none of the turmeric had lead levels of concern.

But government officials and researchers say that enforcement and surveillance must be maintained. “A one-time conviction is not sufficient,” wrote Jahan, who has since moved on from the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority. Follow-up is required as she has “seen such criminals go back to doing what they did even after facing consequences.”

Monzur Morshed Ahmed, a member of BFSA, says that the agency is in the process of procuring handheld X-ray fluorescence analyzers to distribute to districts around Bangladesh so local authorities can continue monitoring the use of lead chromate themselves. And on top of that, he said, BFSA aims to inspect over 7,000 markets and food establishments for violations of food safety, with turmeric being one of the products that will be investigated.

Forsyth is heartened by the impact that she and her colleagues have had in Bangladesh, and she wants to replicate these methods — studying the supply chain, understanding the incentives for adulteration, and creating interventions to dissuade the use of lead chromate — in India and Pakistan.

But reproducing this success is already posing challenges. “It’s easy, obviously, to collect data of spices and analyze them and understand the patterns and where the high levels of lead are. That’s been straightforward,” said Forsyth. Identifying government officials who can advocate for and run an intervention has been harder.

Ending food fraud entirely for any commodity is a huge challenge, said Roberts, the food fraud expert from UCLA. Regulatory agencies in different countries need to set clear standards, enable constant testing and surveillance, and be willing to enforce penalties when someone has committed fraud.

This constant vigilance can be expensive, he continued, and the economic incentive to cheat is going to remain. As such, “it will be interesting to see if this problem pops up again.” Still, many of the interventions used in Bangladesh can be applied to other food communities that have a history of fraud, Roberts added.

“You have to have good science,” said Roberts. “In this case, that turned out to be a blessing for Bangladesh.” And, importantly, he added, “consumers have to care. And in this case, it’s pretty clear that consumers should care because of the health and safety issues.”

In Bangladesh, even those who have committed a crime see this crackdown on lead chromate use as a net good.

Sheikh said he had felt helpless to change direction before the crackdown. Although he didn’t know the precise health impacts of the lead chromate, he said, “it’s common sense that chemicals are harmful.” In fact, he never used peuri-laced turmeric at home.

“I have to answer to Allah that I used it in food,” he recalled. “It hurt me, sometimes, to do that.”

When Shyambazar was raided, Sheikh knew he had to stop. Now, he can rest easy: There’s no economic incentive to adulterate his product.

Outside his polishing mill, Sheikh held up a basket of polished turmeric, ready to be shuttled along to the next set of hands in the supply chain. The roots were a light gold, not as aggressively bright as they used to be. “I’m happy with this color,” he said. “Everyone in Bangladesh is happier with it.”

Wudan Yan is an award-winning independent journalist in Seattle covering science and society.

This story was supported in part by grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the UC Berkeley Food & Farming Fellowship.

Note: Ali Ahsan, a Bangladesh-based producer, translated interviews and coordinated logistics for meetings with farmers and traders.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

A bleary-eyed predawn traveler walking through the arrivals hall of Iceland’s Keflavik Airport blinks at a sight that’s hard at first to register: an enormous advertisement showing a shirtless man holding an infant. The man’s torso and visible arm show a swath of pucker-patterned skin. He looks half-aquatic, like a member of some superhero universe.

As it happens, this sleep-deprived analysis isn’t far off. The baby-holding man, Pétur Oddsson, is a power station worker. In 2020, he endured a 60,000-volt electrical shock; it left almost half his body covered in deep thermal burns that charred layers of his skin off. Such deep and extensive burns can be fatal—skin damaged in this way can’t make new cells to regenerate, and infections can easily set in. But Oddsson’s life was spared by an ingenious invention: grafted cod skin—7,000 square centimeters of it. The procedure adorned Oddsson’s upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.

Oddsson’s cod skin grafts are a marvel of medical technology. But they also represent something else: the manifestation of an unusual and ambitious experiment in environmental efficiency. The skin grafts are just one of a slew of products—including Omega-3 capsules, cold virus pretreatment sprays, and dog snacks—made from what was once Iceland’s cod catch detritus. They come largely from the efforts of 100% Fish—a project spurred by the incubator Iceland Ocean Cluster in collaboration with research institutes and private companies to determine how to repurpose byproducts from the country’s US $2-billion seafood sector.

So far, enterprising Icelanders have unlocked uses for almost 95 percent of a cod—a pretty recent jump forward. In 2003, people only knew what to do with about 40 percent of the fish.

Árni Mathiesen, the cluster’s senior adviser and the country’s former fisheries minister, says the 100% Fish Project has created jobs and manifested once-scarce domestically produced goods. It has also, adds Alexandra Leeper, the cluster’s head of research and innovation, provided lower-impact fish meal for a burgeoning aquaculture industry. Relatedly, 100% Fish is looking beyond cod, too. A company called Nordic Fish Leather is upcycling farmed salmon skin into leather for accessories and another, Primex, is extracting chitosan from the shells of wild-caught Atlantic northern shrimp, which can be used as a blood-clotting agent.

The cod skin grafts are the brainchild of Fertram Sigurjonsson, a chemist and the founder of biotech company Kerecis, which is part of the 100% Fish Project. The grafts come in several sizes—wide strips, for large wounds; glove shapes, for hands; and granules, which act like putty in smaller wounds—and have been used to treat thousands of burn victims, diabetes patients with open wounds, and women with infected C-sections. Doctors can perform some of these procedures with pigskin grafts, but those are harvested from animals engineered for the purpose. The fish skin, conversely, comes from cod caught for human consumption by fishermen in Sigurjonsson’s northwestern hometown of Isafjordur. (Fishermen who also own valuable shares in his company.)

Sigurjonsson says Kerecis currently transforms a mere 0.01 percent of Icelandic cod skins into grafts. But as demand grows, and as Kerecis’ research and development department determines more uses—they’re investigating breast reconstruction—he’s looking to expand.

By weight, a cod is about eight percent skin. Beyond making for good grafting material, cod skin is rich in collagen, a supplement for human skin, ligament, and bone health. Cod skin easily sheds this protein when it’s boiled in water with enzymes, says Hrönn Margrét Magnúsdóttir. She’s the founder of a collagen supplement and energy drink company called Feel Iceland, which uses collagen derived from 700 tonnes of fish skin per year.

Bones account for at least 35 percent of a cod’s weight. Icelandic companies have long dried fish heads and spines with the country’s abundant geothermal energy and exported them to Nigeria, where they’re the base of a protein-rich soup. But Margrét Geirsdóttir, a project manager at Matís, a food and biotechnology research institute that partners with the Iceland Ocean Cluster, says the unpredictability of that market has sent researchers looking for new applications—such as extracting calcium for supplements.

By far the most challenging holdouts to whole-fish use are the blood and eyeballs, says Geirsdóttir.

According to Icelandic lore, squeezing the liquid from a redfish eyeball onto a wound prevents infection. Matís scientists followed this up, studying whether cod eyeballs might have antiseptic properties. No such luck. They also had a project, says Geirsdóttir, to see whether the eyes contained valuable fats. They do, she says, “but it’s such a low amount and you would need to [extract] it by hand, so it’s not paying off.”

Fish blood, accounting for 10 percent of a fish’s weight, might be used to make products like those made from the blood of land animals, such as sausage filler, fish feed, or fertilizer. Yet Geirsdóttir says the hardest part about working with fish blood is collecting it. On a commercial fishing boat, cod are quickly bled to maintain their freshness. Convincing skeptical fishermen to invest in storing the fish intact means proving the endeavor is worthwhile.

There is an optimistic precedent, however. Fishermen once tossed cod livers overboard; now they’re an expensive delicacy that fishermen are happy to preserve. What changed? Several years back, Geirsdóttir says, fishermen began to see high profits from the sale of cod liver. “Then they started to see the value in it,” she says.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The smartphone Fairphone 4 is finally available in the United States. The phone, lauded for its sustainability, is user-repairable and made with responsibly-sourced materials like Fairtrade-certified gold and aluminum from suppliers certified by the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI).

Like many other smartphones, the Fairphone 4 has front and back cameras, an LCD touchscreen, Near Field Communication technology that allows contactless payments via mobile wallets, and even a fingerprint scanner. It also offers at least five years of software support, assuring users that they’ll be providing updates for years to come.

Given that smartphones are the most widely used electronic device around the world, efforts to reduce their environmental impact are important, says Gregory A. Keoleian, director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.

[Related: Memory vs. storage: What to know when buying a new smartphone.]

Emerging trends and technologies often create consumer demand for newer models with better features, even though older phones still function. Smartphones are a significant electronic waste stream in the US with around 151 million products being thrown away annually, and only about 17 percent are properly treated and recycled.

The impact of smartphones on the environment

Smartphones may be small enough to fit in your pocket, but their carbon emissions likely surpass that of desktop computers, laptops, and LCDs. For instance, the iPhone 14 Pro contributes 65 kilograms of carbon emissions throughout its life cycle, which is equivalent to driving about 167 miles in an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle, says Keoleian.

About 80 percent of a smartphone’s carbon footprint is generated during the manufacturing stage. Mining, refining, and transporting precious metals consume a lot of energy, while the act of mining itself harms the natural environment. That’s why, Keoleian says there may be no such thing as a sustainable smartphone. “Every smartphone has impacts related to their manufacture and use, and opportunities exist to further reduce these impacts,” he says.

Consumers can reduce environmental harm by replacing devices less frequently or opting for refurbished phones instead, says Keoleian. Refurbished phones, or pre-owned devices that were restored to “like new” condition and verified to function properly, are cheaper as well. Refurbished iPhone 12 products, which completed full functional testing and come with their standard one-year limited warranty, cost about $120 to $240 lower than new ones.

Joy Scrogum, assistant scientist of sustainability at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, says that manufacturers make more money if consumers believe they need the latest smartphone models. For example, Apple and Samsung, the two companies that currently dominate the smartphone industry, both release new phone models every year. These often come with specs that were improved from the previous model: better camera system, longer battery, performance upgrade of the graphics card, and more.

[Related: Letting your favorite things gather dust is unsustainable—use them.]

However, Scrogum says this belief is not always reflective of reality. “Most people probably don’t use all the processing power or features of their current phone, let alone what they might find on the latest smartphone models,” she adds.

Smartphone users have to reassess whether they really need an upgrade. According to Scrogum, she bought her current smartphone when her now 18-year-old daughter started middle school. Although a few retailer apps are no longer compatible with the device, it’s “not a big deal” and the phone still functions well, she says.

“Would I like a better camera on my phone?,” says Scrogum. “Sure, but that’s not really a need. My phone still does everything I need it to do, and plenty of things I don’t really need, like providing games to play.” She adds that she’ll get a new phone when apps she regularly relies on stop being compatible with the device, but in that case, it’s not that the phone isn’t useful anymore—it’s because app developers stopped making the latest versions of their software compatible with the oldest devices still in service.

How manufacturers can practice sustainability

The best thing manufacturers can do to make devices more sustainable is to design them for repairability and upgradability, says Scrogum. Having components that can be easily removed and replaced is important because it allows consumers to fix issues and upgrade features without having to replace the entire phone.

[Related: Big tech companies are finally making devices easier to repair.]

“In other words, plan for durability rather than obsolescence,” she adds. “Keep in mind that phones which are designed to be easier to take apart for repair are also easier to disassemble at their end-of-life so components and materials can be reused or recycled.” 

Smartphones will also remain in service longer with more equitable access to the tools and information needed for repairs and upgrades. Scrogum says manufacturers can restrict access to replacement parts or tools to control repair through their own authorized technicians, but the cost or proximity to such service providers may be a barrier for some folks.

“When manufacturers make it easier for people to perform DIY repairs and modifications, or to use an independent repair service, they’re making repair a viable option for more people and supporting a more circular economy,” says Scrogum.

Policy support is also crucial. New York passed a Right to Repair law last year that covers smartphones. It ensures that the diagnostic and repair information for digital electronic products available to authorized repair providers is also made available by manufacturers to consumers and independent repair services. Companies like Samsung, Google, and Apple have also established programs allowing consumers and independent repair providers to buy official parts.

Policies requiring standardization of common components may also help consumers keep their smartphones around longer. The European Union recently passed legislation that requires a USB-C charging port for phones and other small- and medium-sized devices like tablets and e-readers by 2024. A mandatory universal charger was established to help reduce the generation of electronic waste. The rule also unbundles chargers with electronic devices, allowing consumers to forgo them when buying a new product and save about $280 million annually on unnecessary charger purchases.

“When in doubt, the ‘greenest’ device is the one you already own, or one previously owned by someone else,” says Scrogum. “We need to keep products in useful service for as long as possible.”

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The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing strict standards on lead paint that would prompt the removal of lead in millions of buildings, including homes, schools, and daycare centers. The move was set in motion by a lawsuit from environmental groups alleging that the EPA’s lead standards were too lax to protect public health.

Even after decades of efforts to reduce lead exposure from gasoline, pipes, and paint, half of children in the U.S. have detectable traces of lead in their blood, according to a study in 2021 that tested more than 1 million kids under the age of 6. Those who live in low-income neighborhoods and in older homes are at the highest risk.

“We know that no level of exposure to lead is good for our children. Zero,” said Janet McCabe, the EPA’s deputy administrator, at an announcement of the proposal in Newark, New Jersey, on Wednesday. The metal has been found to damage children’s brains, slow their growth, and cause developmental and behavioral problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the United States banned lead paint nearly half a century ago, the rules didn’t require removing the toxic substance from existing buildings. An estimated 31 million houses built before the 1978 ban still have lead paint, and nearly 4 million of those homes are occupied by families with children younger than 6. The EPA’s new rule would virtually prohibit lead dust, reducing exposure for between 250,000 and 500,000 children under the age of 6.

Any sign of lead in a home or childcare center would classify it as a lead hazard. That would in turn trigger disclosures—say, to the families of kids attending the daycare or to prospective home buyers—and potentially require that the lead source be removed. The only exception is for contamination that existing cleanup methods can’t get rid of.

The plan was decades in the making. In 1992, after scientists found lead exposure was widespread among children, Congress passed a law requiring the EPA to establish the first hazard standard for lead in dust. But the agency was slow to create the standard, waiting until 2001 to do so, and it failed to tighten the rules when scientific evidence showed that lead was a health hazard even at the smallest levels of exposure.

Court battles ended up forcing the agency to revisit its lead standards—twice. The most recent lawsuit, filed 2019 by the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and other public health and environmental groups, alleged that the EPA’s revised standards were still insufficient. In 2021, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to set its standards based on health effects, as opposed to factors like feasibility and testing capabilities—a decision that prompted the EPA’s new proposed rule. Before an EPA regulation becomes final, it has to move through a public comment period.

Environmental groups applauded the EPA’s new, stricter proposal but admonished the agency for decades of delay. “Today’s proposal, which finally acknowledges that any exposure to lead at any level is a hazard, is a gigantic leap forward in this country’s long-delayed efforts to eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, lead exposures,” said Eve Gartner, the director of Earthjustice’s Crosscutting Toxics Strategies program, at the EPA’s announcement on Wednesday.

Removing lead from buildings won’t necessarily erase the threat entirely. For example, a recent investigation from the Wall Street Journal unearthed a hidden source of lead contamination in the environment: a countrywide network of lead-coated cables laid by telecom giants such as AT&T and Verizon that have gone unnoticed by regulators. It’s another sign that removing lead, with its once-ubiquitous use in the country’s construction, remains a daunting task.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/health/epa-rule-eliminate-lead-paint-buildings-homes/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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In the forests of British Columbia, where recent wildfires have sent smoke across borders and dimmed blue summer skies, a series of studies from the past 30 years contends that large, old trees send resources and messages to the seedlings around them. The “mothering” could, hypothetically, help burned landscapes recover faster, boost the amount of carbon dioxide stores in soil, and improve the resiliency of natural systems overall.

The idea seems to borrow from bedtime tales about ancient trees and the enchanted forests they foster; to validate beliefs about all types of creatures nourish their young; to vouch for the inherent goodness of nature, where collaboration triumphs over competition. 

[Related: Behold the world’s tallest trees]

But two papers have recently called into question the evidence supporting the “mother tree” explanation. Do these veterans of the forest act as guardians for newer generations, protecting them from drought, disease, and deforestation? Or is their relationship much more complicated?

What is a ‘mother tree’?

The term “mother tree” was coined in the 2000s by a Canadian scientist named Suzanne Simard, who grew up in a family of loggers in the Monashee Mountains in British Columbia. The old-growth forests on the range sustained a booming timber industry for more than a century.

In her book Finding the Mother Tree, Simard describes a childhood spent wandering through the forest, gaining keen insight on the intimate connections between long-lived trees like Douglas firs and ponderosa pines and the ecosystems they inhabit. Later, she studied forestry, became a research scientist for the Canadian Ministry of Forests and now teaches and leads a lab at the University of British Columbia.

Her childhood experiences and decades of scientific research led her to draw a connection that was somewhat revolutionary in forestry management and the conventional biological thinking that species must compete to survive. Simard proposed that large trees that are hundreds or even thousands of years old can send carbon, nutrients, water, hormones, and even alarm signals to young plants via a network of underground fungi known as mycorrhiza. She describes these trees as “mothers” in her writing and interviews, and argues that they are essential in making forests around the planet better suited to survive climate change.

“We need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road,” Simard said in her Ted Talk from 2016. “We need to be conservationists.”

What’s the scientific evidence?

Some forestry researchers warn that the mother tree viewpoint is ahead of the science. A paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution in February reviewed 26 studies that look at the ability of underground fungal networks to transfer resources and if mother trees send resources to young plants.

The studies spanned continents, experimental design, and forest and soil type. The authors found that in about 80 percent of the studies, access to mycorrhizal networks associated with nearby trees had no benefit to the seedlings planted around them. In 18 percent of the studies the seedlings did benefit. And in a much smaller subset, those trees and their mycorrhizal networks actually harmed the others

“There are lots of important ecological roles for big trees in the forest,” says Justine Karst, the lead author of the paper and a professor at the University of Alberta. “But this sort of popularized idea of their role and how they work with these fungi as these passive conduits in the soil doing things under the direction of trees, there’s just not really evidence for that.”

Part of the problem is that there’s so much variability within the 26 studies, making it difficult to draw conclusions about mother trees—or large, old trees, as Karst prefers to call them—as a whole. 

“It differs in which forest the experiment was conducted in: how far the seedlings were growing from the mature tree, the type of seeds or the type of soils, if there’s overstory mortality,” Karst explains. “There’s so many of these background features that there’s just no way to generalize. This is something that we would suggest moving forward is that we need to understand, what is the cause of this variability? 

Another issue is that most of the research that supports the mother tree theory comes from studies in labs, Meghan Midgley, a soil ecologist at Morton Arboretum who was not an author on the recent review, explains. “We haven’t been able to observe it in the forest, which is where we’d really want to see this sort of relationship happening.” 

The idea might even be so appealing, scientists have let it bias them. “There are alternative explanations that have not been acknowledged in studies,” Karst says. For example, one common experimental design using mesh bag encourages different types of fungal growth, potentially biasing the results. 

PopSci reached out to Simard and The Mother Tree Project about these scientific uncertainties, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

What role do fungi play?

One facet of the mother tree debate experts agree on is that fungi have a unique relationship with trees. Midgley studies this symbiotic subset of organisms, which grow on the tree’s root system and allow it to gain access to water and nutrients deep in the soil. In return, the guests get carbon, which the fungi can’t can’t produce itself. “From the tropics to boreal forests, trees are associating with fungi,” Midgley says. “This is a relationship that has been established for much of evolutionary time.

These collaborative fungi also have an overall beneficial effect on plants. “There are many hundreds of studies showing that when there’s no fungi, plants don’t grow as well as when there are fungi,” Midgeley adds. “There’s also some evidence that they can help protect plants from below-ground pathogens or from being eaten by below-ground invertebrates, so they can play a variety of roles for a plant.”

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers]

Knowing this, forest manager might take fungi, as well as large, old trees, into account when restoring an ecosystem after a wildfire. However, there’s not enough evidence right now to support specific strategies, like introducing fungi into a forest that’s been harmed by wildfire, Midgley says.

She and Karst both suggest further research that would help scientists better understand the variability between mature trees and their relationships with fungi and the rest of the forest. “Why do seedlings sometimes show no response, a positive response, or a negative response [to older trees]?” Karst says. “We don’t know those answers, but I think that they’ll be important to find out.”

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This article was originally featured on Nexus Media News.

On a recent spring afternoon, journalist Alden Wicker was examining a neon orange purse at H&M. The price tag read $14.99, but instead of listing materials, it simply said “vegan.” She raised an eyebrow. At Wicker’s request, a store clerk looked up the materials: polyurethane and polyester. Plastics.

For the last decade, Wicker has been covering the dirty side of fast fashion—from its contribution to the climate crisis and greenwashing to multi-level marketing schemes. She founded the popular blog EcoCult in 2013 and has become an authority on sustainable fashion.

Wicker’s new book, To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick, examines the public health impacts of chemically-treated fabrics and synthetic fibers. She spent two years interviewing.

She found that fashion is rife with toxic chemicals, like formaldehyde and chromium, which are both carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting polyfluoroalkyl substances (also known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals”), linked to infertility and other health issues. And despite the potential harm, she discovered that the U.S. has done little to protect consumers from the clothes they wear.

“We’re allowing chemicals to be poured indiscriminately into the environment, but we’re also bringing them into our homes,” Wicker said. The effects of these chemicals on textile workers and their communities were well documented, but Wicker worried that the issue remained abstract to U.S. consumers. “This isn’t an ‘over-there’ problem,” she said. 

Wicker got the idea for the book in 2019 when a radio producer called to ask if she could comment on a lawsuit filed by Delta employees against the clothing company Land’s End, alleging that its uniforms were making them sick.

“I’d heard nothing about fashion or textiles being toxic enough to affect people’s health,” she said. In fact, flight attendants at several major airlines were complaining of rashes, hair loss, fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations and trouble breathing. “Their bodies would start shutting down. They couldn’t work, and in some cases, that completely ruined their lives,” Wicker said. 

Researchers at Harvard University attributed the attendants’ reactions to long exposures to a combination of chemicals like anti-wrinkle and anti-stain resins and disperse dyes, which can leach into the skin through sweat. (Flight attendants sometimes wear their uniforms for up to 24 hours at a time.)

The flight attendants are just an extreme case of clothes making people sick, Wicker said. In the course of her reporting, she dug up suits against the children’s-clothing brand Carter’s and Victoria’s Secret, in which consumers said their clothes gave them severe rashes. It’s exceedingly difficult to prove the toxicity of a piece of clothing because a single shirt may have passed through several factories and can comprise an untold number of chemicals, she said.

“There’s no ingredient list in fashion,” Wicker said. “If you’re allergic to nickel, or disperse dyes, or formaldehyde, you can avoid it in beauty products, cleaning products, food products—but not in fashion.” In the book, she speaks with researchers who connect declining fertility rates and the rise of autoimmune diagnoses in the U.S. with chemicals found in our clothes. 

The book is a series of vignettes about people whose lives were altered by illnesses they believe came from the chemicals in their clothes: The widower of an Alaska Airlines flight attendant who developed a litany of health problems, including trouble breathing and blistering on his arms, right after he received a new uniform. A textile worker in Tirupur, in southern India, whose arms and legs were covered in blisters that only started to disappear after she quit her job. A California marketing executive whose dye allergies had caused her to scratch herself until she bled in her sleep. 

“You can draw a straight line from Leelavathi in India to this woman in California and their skin issues,” Wicker said. “The woman in California has more resources than the garment worker, and they live very different lives, but living in America doesn’t shield you from this.” 

The European Union, and even the state of California, have passed regulations on so-called “forever chemicals” in fashion, and Wicker wants to see the federal government follow suit. (Last week, chemical manufacturer 3M reached a $10 billion settlement over the contamination of many U.S. public drinking water systems with PFAS, some of the same substances found in clothes.)

In the book, she calls for more regulation and research into the chemicals that go into making our clothes, empowering regulators to test and recall toxic items, requiring ingredient lists on fashion products and a crackdown on greenwashing.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we switched to a precautionary principle where, when it comes to chemicals, it’s not innocent until proven guilty?” she mused. “Let’s make sure they’re safe before we use them.”

Wicker is wary of conscious consumerism — even if this book is an appeal for consumer safety. “I don’t want this to become a ‘shop your way out of it’ thing,” she said. She seized on a piece of advice from one of her interviewees, a researcher at Duke University who found high concentrations of potentially carcinogenic, synthetic Azo dyes in children’s clothing. 

“I asked how she changed her shopping habits. She said: ‘Just shop less’.”

Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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During all sorts of major celebrations, people around the world often anticipate the bursts of color and sounds of crackling explosions of fireworks displays. But no matter how entertaining they are, their environmental impacts should not be overlooked. Each firework shoots off light, noise, and particulate pollution that may affect wildlife behavior and trigger respiratory problems, allergies, and PTSD in people. To avoid harmful health and environmental effects, it’s important to explore greener, safer alternatives to fireworks.

How fireworks affect the environment

The explosions you see in fireworks are chemical reactions. They contain oxidizers like perchlorates and nitrates that break down chemical bonds in the fuel source, which could be charcoal-based. Metals like copper, strontium, and barium are added to produce color.

When fireworks explode, they release sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and heavy metals into the atmosphere, says Gwen O’Sullivan, an environmental chemist and department chair of earth and environmental science at Mount Royal University in Canada. They can rapidly deteriorate air quality, especially in areas with concentrated displays. Inhaling these pollutants can be particularly harmful to people with respiratory conditions, O’Sullivan adds.

A 2015 study in the journal Atmospheric Environment found that Fourth of July fireworks increase particulate matter concentrations by an average of 42 percent across the US. Although the levels generally diminish the next day, the temporary increase in air pollution can be dangerous.

“These substances can be deposited from the atmosphere into water bodies, causing adverse effects on aquatic life and overall water quality,” says O’Sullivan. Some chemicals, like perchlorate, may leach into water bodies and be absorbed by plants. They can then possibly be consumed by wildlife and enter the food chain.

[Related: How to comfort pets and babies during fireworks]

Aside from releasing chemicals into the environment, fireworks are also a source of short-term sound and light disturbance. Over the years, New Year’s Eve fireworks in Europe have been observed to cause a variety of impacts on bird life, including a sharp and sudden decline in Eurasian magpies’ roost size, a 26 to 35 percent drop overnight in swan, goose, and duck numbers on Lake Zurich, and the evacuation of thousands of birds in the Netherlands. The ecological impacts of firework noise may also influence wildlife breeding outcomes.

“While light and sound can be fleeting, they still have a profound effect on wildlife and [on] us,” says Bill Bateman, associate professor in the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University in Australia. “The air [pollution] and subsequent soil and water pollution can be considerable and long lasting.”

Safer firework alternatives for any holiday

With all the emotions and nostalgia surrounding fireworks shows, it can be challenging for people to explore other options, says O’Sullivan. Choreographed light displays, like drone and laser shows, may preserve the visual allure of the celebrations. “Drones are increasingly being used in place of fireworks due to their advantages of producing no harmful smoke or chemicals, being reusable, and their ability to be programmed for intricate aerial formations,” O’Sullivan adds. Places like Salt Lake City, Utah and Boulder, Colorado have replaced traditional fireworks displays with drone shows for the Fourth of July.

In India, some people are switching to “green crackers,” which refers to fireworks or firecrackers made with a smaller shell size and reduced usage of raw material in the overall composition. They may also involve the use of additives like dust suppressants that reduce emissions. These green crackers are estimated to reduce particulate matter pollution by 30 percent. However, manufacturing fireworks with lower levels of heavy metals and no perchlorate tends to be costly.

Additionally, although environmentally friendly fireworks that replace structural parts and chemical ingredients to reduce the release of smoke, metals, and perchlorates do emit fewer pollutants, “their specific impact on air quality has not been thoroughly evaluated,” says O’Sullivan. More research is necessary to look into the benefits of eco-friendly fireworks over conventional ones.

[Related: Host a sustainable affair with these environmentally-friendly tips]

Simple party poppers or confetti cannons filled with biodegradable materials like water-soluble rice paper may be a more accessible, fitting replacement for fireworks. Families might also enjoy bubble guns, which are entertaining and don’t leave any waste behind.

In general, there are plenty of alternatives to fireworks for those who are really eager to avoid their effects on the environment. If you can’t quit fireworks altogether, Bateman says even just having shorter and fewer displays will make a huge difference in making holidays safer and more peaceful for everyone.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Two scourges of 20th century public and environmental health—microplastics and antimicrobial resistance—seem to be teaming up to birth a whole new worry.

The ocean is teeming with microorganisms. And since the mid-20th century, plastic. Scientists have previously discovered how plastic creates habitat and a handy transport system for marine microbes, including potentially harmful human pathogens. Now, researchers led by Sasha Tetu, a microbiologist at Macquarie University in Australia, have shown that chemicals leaching from marine microplastic pollution can alter the composition of microbial communities, making them more virulent and increasing the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance.

Tetu and her colleagues conducted their work in the lab. They collected samples of seawater, mixed them with the leachates from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and analyzed how the DNA of the bacteria living in the water changed over six days.

PVC is one of the most common plastics, and like many other plastics, it leaches additives like metals, dyes, and stabilizers—compounds added to improve the plastic’s performance.

The scientists aren’t exactly sure how or why, but the plastic-addled bacteria increasingly carry genes related to higher virulence and antimicrobial resistance.

When they dug deeper into their results, they found that the effect is more complex than a blanket increase in resistance to all antimicrobials. Instead, the bacteria showed an increased abundance of genes that offer resistance to some classes of antimicrobials and a decreased prevalence of genes protecting them from other groups of antibiotics.

Likewise, the prevalence of genes that encode for certain types of virulence, such as mechanisms to suppress a host’s immune response, increased significantly, while those linked to other harmful activities decreased.

Many of the genes for antimicrobial resistance were identified in bacteria that are not known to be human pathogens. But this does not mean they do not pose a risk to human health, Tetu says. “Microbes have many different ways of sharing genes, often across distantly related lineages.”

Tetu says her research is a first step and that more investigation is needed to determine how plastic leachates may be affecting microbial communities. But the gist is that plastic exposure seems to select for hardier microbes, with increasing antimicrobial resistance being an unhappy little accident.

“Exposure to such leached chemicals,” says Tetu, “selects for a suite of opportunistic environmental microbes that are likely more metabolically versatile and also happen to carry a variety of genes associated with antimicrobial resistance.”

Emily Stevenson, a graduate student at the University of Exeter in England, studies how microplastics affect the spread of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. She says this new research gets at important questions around how plastic exposure changes microbial communities. How well the laboratory findings translate into real-world conditions is hard to know, but Stevenson says it’s worrying.

“What I am particularly concerned about,” she says, “is where these leachates are antimicrobials themselves.” A lot of plastics are impregnated with known antimicrobials, such as triclosan. “If that is bioavailable to the bugs, then that would be adding a selective pressure, so they are likely to evolve antimicrobial resistance,” she adds.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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We are at the beginning of a green technological revolution, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The transition to a low-carbon economy to mitigate climate change would not be possible without green technologies like electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage systems. However, these technologies rely on over 10 different minerals and metals—including copper, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum—whose production must increase significantly to meet demand.

By 2050, the annual supply of copper and nickel, in particular, will have to increase by about 150 to 200 percent relative to 2020 production levels to meet the needs of green technology deployments. If production grows rapidly, the associated environmental impacts and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are expected to rise as well. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the GHG emissions of copper and nickel may increase by 125 and 90 percent, respectively, by 2050. Therefore, decarbonizing the mining industry is an essential part of meeting global climate targets.

How mining affects the environment

Mining is an environmentally invasive process. Its impacts manifest in land use change, disturbance to local ecosystems, and GHG emissions, says Paolo Natali, a principal with RMI’s climate intelligence program who leads the Supply Chain Emissions Initiative. The nature of mining is to disturb large areas of land to retrieve resources deep below the surface, that’s why it can drive deforestation and increase the erosion rate greatly. Waste rock and tailings from mining may also contaminate the soil and water, which, combined with the clearing of forests, contributes to habitat loss and ecosystem damage.

[Related on PopSci+: The summer issue of PopSci is extremely metal.]

Mining is also a significant source of GHG emissions due to the use of diesel-powered equipment, which releases carbon dioxide, as well as through the release of trapped gasses like methane, says Natali. The supply chain is also energy-intensive because activities like drilling and blasting, material handling or the process of moving the mined material out of the mine via conveyor belts or trucks, grinding, metal smelting, and transporting all require a lot of energy.

Natali says copper and nickel extraction, in particular, are experiencing declining ore grades. Ore grades refer to the concentration of the mineral or metal content in an ore-bearing rock. Declining grades means that it’s taking more effort to gather the same amount of mineral, and therefore using up more energy and resulting emissions, he adds. As the ore grade decreases, the energy, diesel, and electricity used all increase. The finite nature of these resources—which makes it necessary to go deeper and into more remote areas to keep finding them—and the economies of scale that the mining industry has developed have enabled lower grades to be processed profitably, says Natali.

Increasing the production of copper and nickel to address the growing need for green technologies would increase the impacts of mining and harm the environment even further. Perrine Toledano, the director of research and policy at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, says meeting the rising mineral demand will put pressure on freshwater resources in copper mining regions and present a significant biodiversity risk in locations with nickel reserves. Chile, the world’s top copper producer, is already water-scarce and will face increasing water risks due to the impacts of climate change.

Overall, decarbonizing mining is necessary to successfully transition to a low-carbon economy.

Decarbonizing copper and nickel mining

To cut emissions associated with carbon-intensive energy production, the industry should replace fossil fuels and its generated electricity with renewable energy, sustainable biofuels, and green hydrogen, says Toledano. For instance, eliminating diesel use in mining equipment may remove up to 40 percent of a mine site’s emissions.

Aside from using clean electricity, Natali says adopting higher precision mining techniques to improve ore grades and electrifying the energy input, like by using conveyors or electric trucks during material handling, are crucial. Latest developments in battery electric large-haul trucks, such as fast charging or hydrogen fuel-cell range extenders, will have to be coupled with the increasing use of renewable energy and new technologies downstream to eliminate emissions from high temperature and chemical processes like smelting and refining, he adds.

[Related: For years, Chile exploited its environment to grow. Now it’s trying to save it.]

Circular economy interventions like increasing metal recovery and reusing mineral and non-mineral waste may also support emission reductions across the mining value chains. Both copper and nickel can be recycled repeatedly without losing their properties or quality. Moreover, recycled copper uses about 85 percent less energy than primary production.

Policymakers can support a just transition to net zero mining by establishing stricter and clearer regulation of mining activities and subsidizing green energy, says Natali. He also recommends requiring that imported minerals face similar environmental and social standards with domestically produced minerals.

Fossil fuel subsidies in place create an artificial cost disadvantage for renewables, says Toledano. Such subsidies reduce the cost of fossil-fuel-powered electricity generation, which makes renewable energy less competitive. They can also reinforce the reliance on fossil fuels and make it more favorable. Therefore, policymakers must ensure the penetration of renewable energies, which could support the transition of the mining industry to clean energy.

Decarbonizing copper and nickel mining won’t happen in an instant. However, by switching to renewable energy, improving production efficiency, and establishing policies that include climate-related mitigation and adaptation obligations on mining operations, meeting increasing mineral demand with fewer emissions may become achievable.

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For decades, drivers in the United States have been able to think about the efficiency of their gas-powered vehicles with a simple criteria: miles per gallon. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency started publishing the mpg metric for vehicles in the 1970s, and it makes intuitive sense. Theoretically, how far could your car travel on a single gallon of gasoline? The mpg figure is the answer.

But with electric vehicles—as well as plug-in hybrids—the situation gets a tad more complex. A pure EV does not burn gasoline. It gets the energy for its batteries from the grid, and is better for the environment. 

Enter the MPGe metric, which stands for mile per gallon of gasoline-equivalent and “allows [for] a reasonable comparison between vehicles using different fuels,” the EPA says.

What is MPGe?

New EPA vehicle labels debuted in 2012. For electric vehicles, it includes the EV’s “fuel economy” listed in MPGe, as well as other metrics, like its range. You can check out the EPA’s EV label on the agency’s site. For plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, that PHEV label shows both the car’s efficiency when running on just battery power (in MPGe), as well as its efficiency if it were just burning gasoline, in mpg. And of course, a traditional vehicle that burns only gasoline has a label with the regular mpg metric. 

One commonality between the mpg metric and MPGe is that a larger number means better efficiency. “Miles per gallon is designed such that bigger numbers are better,” says David Gohlke, an energy and environmental analyst at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “Higher miles per gallon means you go farther—you get more goodness out of the gallon of gasoline that you’re burning.” 

[Related: Volvo’s new electric EX30 is cheaper than a Tesla Model 3]

The bigger-is-better metric might sound obvious, but that’s not always the case with other measurement metrics for vehicle efficiency. For example, the gasoline vehicle sticker also features a gallons-per-100-miles figure, and in that case, a lower number represents better fuel efficiency—ideally, you want to burn as few gallons as possible when driving 100 miles. Ditto, on an EV’s sticker you’ll find the kilowatt-hours-per-100-miles metric, with lower being more efficient. And a PHEV vehicle’s sticker contains both of those lower-is-better metrics. 

But with the proliferation of EVs, the main metric to keep in mind is MPGe. “The EPA said, ‘Okay, well we’re going to need some way of describing these electric vehicles to the average person,” Gohlke says. “The EPA has come up with a conversion factor that translates from a kilowatt-hour of energy into the equivalent amount of energy in terms of a gallon of gasoline.” 

How is MPGe calculated?

The kilowatt hours (kWh) equivalent from gas comes from “the total heat content that exists in a gallon of gasoline,” Gohlke says. “They say, ‘Okay, if we took this gallon of gasoline, and set it on fire, effectively, how much heat energy can we get out of that?’” 

The answer to that question is 33.7 kWh. An EPA spokesperson notes via email that this figure is “a standard number for the energy content in gasoline.”

[Related: How to use less gas when driving with Google Maps]

So now the question becomes: How far can an EV travel on 33.7 kWh, which is equal to the energy in 1 gallon of gas? And that’s where the MPGe figure comes from. 

For context when it comes to understanding kWh, the average American home used about 886 kWh of electricity each month in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Considering a 30-day month, that means daily electric use is about 30 kWh. If you have a 1,000-watt (1 kilowatt) microwave and use it for an hour, you’ve used 1 kWh of electricity. So MPGe is saying: Here’s how many miles this EV can travel on an amount of electricity that is just a bit more than the average US household consumes each day. 

How can you find an EV’s MPGe? 

To see how the EPA rates an EV with this MPGe metric, you can look up the vehicle at fueleconomy.gov. For example, one variant of the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6 gets 140 MPGe, when combining its city (153) and highway (127) ratings. That’s superb. A 2023 Tesla Model 3 gets 132 MPGe. What about the gargantuan GMC Hummer EV? It’s rated for 47 MPGe. The Hyundai and the Tesla are way more efficient than the Hummer. 

Even if the MPGe measurement takes some getting used to, Paul Waatti, manager of industry analysis at AutoPacific, argues that it plays an important role. That’s because an EV’s range, which is also listed on the sticker, isn’t the full story. “That doesn’t necessarily tell you how efficient the vehicle actually is,” he says. “You might have a really high range number, like [with the electric] Hummer for example, but if you look at the MPGe figure for that, it shows that it’s very inefficient.” 

Ultimately, the MPGe metric isn’t perfect, but it’s good to have. “From a consumer perspective, I think there’s still quite a bit of confusion on what it actually means,” Waatti says. Still, he argues that it’s an important metric for giving people a sense of the car’s efficiency. 

Bottom line: A higher MPGe means the EV is more efficient, and right now, a number at or close to 140 is ideal.

The post What an electric vehicle’s MPGe rating really means appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the late 1700s, King George III glimpsed the future of shipping. Sir Charles Middleton, comptroller of the British Royal Navy, approached the monarch with a vision. His pitch came with a demo—a specially modified model of a warship called the Bellona. The king’s eye soon fell on the shimmering copper plates that encased the miniature ship’s hull below the waterline.

“It was … shall we say, blinged up,” says Simon Stephens, curator of ship models at Royal Museums Greenwich in London, England. When the king heard how the plates could make ships faster, by repelling marine organisms that would otherwise encrust their hulls, he was sold. By the early 1780s, the entire British naval fleet got the bling treatment, too: hundreds of warships were adorned with copper plates mounted like overlapping roof tiles to ease the flow of water across them.

Middleton and his copper plates more or less solved an age-old maritime headache. Since the advent of long-distance sailing, ships that had lengthy stays at sea returned to port with hulls contaminated by barnacles, seaweed, and other marine gunk. This slowed the vessels down—imagine trying to push a slimy, bumpy pineapple through water. Laborers toiled for days or weeks to scrape vessels clean again. But because copper is toxic to many marine organisms, Middleton’s plated ships remained smooth.

Today, copper is still applied to many oceangoing vessels—often as a component in certain characteristically red antifouling paints. As in the 1700s, the copper prevents fouling, leaving a smoother hull that creates less drag. This reduces fuel consumption and lowers carbon emissions. Less fouling also means fewer potentially invasive marine species being ferried around the world.

Yet with new regulations tightening emissions requirements, ship owners are taking hull coatings more seriously than ever before. Behind the scenes, the search for even better, more environmentally friendly solutions is gathering pace.

The challenge is to find effective, sustainable coatings that don’t cost the Earth or leach heavy metals into the ocean. Ship owners must choose carefully. Even a small increase in the roughness of a ship’s hull can have a dramatic effect on emissions, explains Nick Aldred, a marine biologist at the University of Essex in England: “You lose out in a big way by having any barnacles.”

When a ship enters the water, it doesn’t take long for bacteria and phytoplankton to colonize the hull. The microbes create a biofilm that attracts other organisms, and eventually the hull can become caked in barnacles and seaweed, says Maria Salta, a marine biofilm expert at Endures, a company in the Netherlands that studies fouling and corrosion.

So if you own a ship and want to stop this from happening, you have, broadly speaking, two options, says Salta: either a biocide-based coating or a fouling-release coating.

Like Middleton’s copper plates, biocidal coatings kill organisms looking to adhere to the ship’s hull. But it’s possible to push this too far, and the biocidal coating tributyltin (TBT) is a disastrous example of what’s at stake. This potent antifouling coating was used on ships’ hulls for decades, but it poisoned seaways and caused oysters’ shells to thicken so much that the creatures could no longer open their shells to feed. TBT was banned internationally in 2008.

The other option, a fouling-release coating, is like cooking with a nonstick frying pan, says Salta. Organisms generally won’t stick to fouling-release coatings, and if they do, they tend to adhere weakly and drop off when the ship gets underway.

An example is the silicone-based coating Sigmaglide, which PPG Industries has been gradually updating and improving for around 20 years. At one time, the coating was transparent. “It was very difficult to apply; you could not see where you sprayed it,” says Joanna van Helmond, PPG’s global product manager of antifouling and fouling release.

The firm soon added a pigment and tweaked the coating to be less sensitive to temperature and humidity, making it easier to spritz onto hulls in shipyards around the world. In March, the company announced the latest version of this coating. Van Helmond declined to elaborate on how it works, but says the coating reacts with water, aligning at the nanoscale to become extra smooth.

However, Van Helmond did say that in laboratory trials the coating significantly reduced drag. When compared with traditional antifouling coatings, such as PPG’s own biocidal Sigma Ecofleet 290, the company claims its new super sleek coating can reduce a ship’s carbon emissions by up to 35 percent.

Yet fouling-release coatings can be expensive compared with other options. And as Aldred notes, these coatings only work properly when water constantly brushes against the ship’s hull. That makes fouling-release coatings less useful for ships that are static for long periods, such as naval vessels.

Innovations to tackle fouling continue to develop in the footsteps of Middleton’s copper plates, and some of the most cutting-edge efforts to reduce fouling and drag function quite differently from existing coatings.

Take, for instance, the textured covering inspired by sharks that was prototyped by AkzoNobel, a Dutch firm. Rather than trying to make a ship’s hull extremely smooth, it mimicked shark skin’s characteristic roughness, which is naturally drag reducing and antifouling. Such textures have been applied successfully to the bodies of commercial airplanes to reduce drag in the air, though AkzoNobel has yet to report the same success in the water. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other scientists are looking to use ultrasound or ultraviolet light to deter marine organisms from attaching to hulls. Killing microbes before they get a chance to stick to the vessel could prevent the formation of biofilm onto which barnacles and other stowaways attach. Aldred cautions that these approaches have not been fully evaluated and could come with some unfortunate side effects. “Are we going to be selecting and breeding algae that are resistant to UV, for example? You can imagine all kinds of consequences,” he says.

In their own work, Aldred and his colleagues hope to develop a substance that would actually encourage the formation of a biofilm. But a special kind of biofilm. The team has identified bacteria capable of degrading barnacle glue, he says, which could prevent large marine organisms from colonizing a hull.

“We have a joke in our project that if we ever launched a company to sell this slime, we’d call it boat yogurt,” he explains. “It’s a kind of probiotic for your boat.”

Their research is yet to be published, and Aldred declines to share further details, though he says that, so far, he is happy with the results.

At least royal approval is no longer a requirement. What would King George III have made of boat yogurt?

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

The post Why scientists want to banish barnacles from ship hulls appeared first on Popular Science.

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The raging wildfires in Canada recently engulfed the Northeastern US in smoke, causing the air quality to plummet to some of the worst ever recorded in the region. To minimize the exposure to hazardous air, health officials recommended that people stay indoors and wear masks. However, animals are also vulnerable to smoke inhalation. Zoos across New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia closed last week to bring their animals indoors, but free-roaming ones had nowhere to go to escape the smoke.

How animals are affected by wildfire smoke

Like humans, animals can inhale wildfire smoke and experience respiratory irritation and detrimental impacts on their cardiovascular system, says Lisa Miller, professor of anatomy, physiology, and cell biology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. All creatures that breathe air, whether they live on land or at sea, are vulnerable to airborne toxins found in wildlife smoke, such as fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen cyanide. Inhaling smoke can make them susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning, a life-threatening condition that limits oxygen supply to the blood, tissues, and organs.

Smoke inhalation can further result in tachycardia and respiratory symptoms like labored breathing, panting, and coughing. Death from smoke-induced asphyxiation is also a possibility. Repeated or prolonged exposure to smoke can weaken animals’ immune response or result in chronic heart disease, but long-term, adverse health impacts may also come from a single smoke event.

[Related: Almost everyone in the world breathes unhealthy air]

The health effects of smoke can vary greatly because the toxicity depends on the distance from the burn site and the type of fire, says Miller. As the pollutants travel, their properties may be altered by the sun and other chemicals in the air. What’s burned in the wildfire also matters, whether it’s only biomass like trees and plants or human-made materials like homes and cars. “All of these factors make understanding the science of wildfires so challenging,” Miller adds.

Some groups of animals, like birds, are at greater risk of experiencing negative health outcomes. “Birds are highly sensitive to air pollution because their respiratory system supports highly efficient gas exchange and lacks some of the mechanisms mammals use to clear particles from their airways,” says Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science. Aside from physiology, behavior and habitat use may also influence how much smoke a creature is exposed to, and, subsequently, the short- or long-term health issues they might face.

However, there are still some major questions on the harms of wildfire smoke on wildlife.

Checking up on wildlife health after fires

According to a 2022 review in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Sanderfoot and her collaborators, there are a limited number of published studies investigating the health outcomes and behavioral responses of animals who’ve inhaled wildfire smoke. For example, there is a lot left to learn about any strategies animals may use to reduce their exposure to air pollution, says Sanderfoot.

The difficulty of conducting this kind of research may be a contributor. Monitoring animals before, during, and after wildfires is difficult to plan and may put the health and safety of workers at risk. And while studying animal response in controlled environments like labs or outdoor enclosures may be easier to implement, scientists can’t reproduce the exact air quality and visibility conditions that occur in the environment.

In her research, Sanderfoot uses citizen science data to learn more about how smoke affects birds. She encourages people in areas affected by wildfires or hazardous air quality to contribute wildlife observations to online databases like eBird or iNaturalist, which gather and provide data for research and conservation purposes. Observations on smoky days would be particularly useful, she adds, but it’s important to wear an N95 mask when going out.

Ways to protect animals from wildfire smoke

Understanding how wildfire smoke affects wildlife is crucial in preventing dangerous health impacts as the planet gets even hotter. Climate change can make wildfires more frequent and intense with increased drought, high air temperatures, and strong winds, resulting in hotter, drier, and longer fire seasons in some regions. The number of wildfires is expected to increase globally by up to 14 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by 2100. A feedback loop occurs: Fires can also exacerbate climate change because burning ecosystems like peatlands and rainforests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The best way to protect wildlife from smoke inhalation, habitat loss, and other fire-related issues is to prevent high-severity wildland fires in the first place. According to a 2023 review in the journal Conservation, a combination of public and personal land management, social governance, and efficient fire suppression efforts like fire lines are needed to reduce wildfire risk and improve response mechanisms. This could cover measures ranging from proper land regulation to protections for areas with endangered species.

[Related: Longleaf pine forests in Alabama are making a comeback—thanks to fire]

Raising awareness about the risks of setting small blazes, like campfires, in the dry season is also essential. A 2017 study in the journal PNAS analyzed US wildfire data from 1992 to 2012, excluding controlled agricultural fires and those with an unknown cause. They found that human-started fires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires.
More information about the impacts of smoke on wildlife is needed to possibly adjust conservation plans in fire-heavy times of the year, says Sanderfoot. After large wildfires, agencies like the US Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management work together to restore animal habitats and support population comebacks. “Sometimes, science feels slow, but every day we make a little bit more progress,” says Sanderfoot. “Soon I hope we’ll have a much better sense of how we help wildlife endure both hotter and smokier summers.”

The post Clouds of wildfire smoke are toxic to humans and animals alike appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you’re in North America right now, there’s a decent chance wildfire smoke is affecting you. Here in New York, the air quality is rather awful, so many people are rushing to buy air purifiers. While we have recommended some of the best air purifiers, we know price is a consideration. And while many retailers rush to apply misleading “discounts” to air purifier models, there are some deals out there to be had if you know where to look.

We haven’t personally tested every model on this list, but the selections presented here represent discounts below the products’ usual prices. And we’ve stuck to reputable brands with solid reputations because you definitely want your air purifier to actually purify the air if you’re going to shell out your cash to get it.

This very simple air purifier relies on a dual-filter HEPA system to pull particulates out of the air. It can handle a roughly 130-square-foot space and operates extremely quietly. With the coupon applied, this is the cheapest it has been in some time. So, if you’re looking for a simple, quiet solution to clean up the air in your office or bedroom, this is a solid deal.

BISSELL® air280 Max WiFi Connected Smart Air Purifier with HEPA & Carbon Filter Large Room $189.99 (Was $299)

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If you want a larger model that will handle a much bigger space, Bissell’s whole-home solution is considerably cheaper now than a month ago. It can handle spaces up to 1,350 square feet with one air change per hour. Put it in a smaller room, and it’ll refresh the air even more often.

More air purifier deals

We expect a lot of people are buying a lot of air purifiers right now, so these deals might not hang around as long as the smoke in the air. iI you see something you want in stock, we say snag it.

• Dyson – Pure Cool Purifying Fan TP01 $329 (was $429)
• Shark HP102PET Clean Sense Air Purifier for Home $149 (was $239)
• LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Home Large Room Up to 1900 Ft $154 (was $189)
• LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Home Large Room, Smart WiFi $399 (with coupon, was $499)
• hOmeLabs 4-in-1 Compact Air Purifier $38.95 (was $69.99)
• LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Home Large Room, Covers Up to 3175 Sq. Ft $269 (was $299)
• Filtrete Air Purifier, Large Room with True HEPA Filter $142 (was $179)
• Nuwave Oxypure Air Purifier Pro for Extra Large Room $537 (was $599)
• Shark HE402 Air Purifier 4 True HEPA Cleans up to 1000 Sq. Ft $219 (was $349)
• Honeywell HHT270 Air Purifier, Small Rooms $46 (was $65)
• LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Bedroom Home $42 (was $49)
• LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Home Large Room $269 (with coupon, was $299)
• LEVOIT Air Purifiers for Home Large Room Bedroom Up to 1110 Ft $118 (was $139)
• LG – PuriCare 818 Sq. Ft. Smart HEPA AeroTower Air Purifying Fan $299 (was $549)
• Blueair – Blue Pure 211i Max 635 Sq. Ft HEPASilent Smart Extra-Large Room Air Purifier $279 (was $349)
• Insignia™ – 497 Sq. Ft. HEPA Air Purifier $159 (was $249)
• Levoit – PlasmaPro 400s Smart 403 Sq. Ft True HEPA Air Purifier $249 (was $289)
• Filtrete – 310 Sq. Ft. Smart Air Purifier for Large Rooms $199 (was $349)
• Filtrete – 150 Sq. Ft. Smart Air Purifier for Medium Rooms $149 (was $284)

The post These air purifiers are actually on sale right now at Amazon and Best Buy appeared first on Popular Science.

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The use of plastic across all facets of human life has grown more and more pervasive in the last few decades, resulting in a surge in global environmental pollution. More than half of the amount of plastic produced from 1950 to 2017 became plastic waste, which harms ecosystems, livelihoods, and food security around the globe. In the United States alone, about 35.7 million tons of plastic were generated in 2018. Exploring potential alternatives to conventional petroleum-based plastics, like bioplastics, is necessary to mitigate pollution and reduce the waste stream.

Bioplastics are usually made from extracted starches, oils, and sugars from renewable sources such as corn and sugarcane—like poly(lactic acids) or PLAs. Others are made from polymers produced by microorganisms, like polyhydroxyalkanoates or PHAs. PLA, one of the most commonly used bioplastics, has similar functionalities to conventional plastic and is considered to be recyclable, biodegradable, and compostable. “Biodegradable” means that it can be degraded naturally by microorganisms, while “compostable” means it is biodegradable in industrial composting operations. However, new research shows that PLA might not be as environmentally friendly as initially thought.

[Related: Why the recycling symbol is part of a ‘misinformation campaign’.]

Because PLA is applied extensively in single-use items and often touted as an alternative to conventional plastics, the authors of a recent PLOS One study looked into the biodegradability of textiles made of PLA in marine waters. The authors found that PLA showed no sign of environmental degradation even after spending 428 days under natural marine conditions. If consumers are buying PLA thinking it’s an ecological solution to plastic items since it biodegrades under normal conditions, they are being misled, says Sarah-Jeanne Royer, visiting scholar at the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was involved in the study.

She adds that PLA is only compostable under specific high-temperature conditions that “cannot be found in nature.” Therefore, the material needs to be properly disposed of and composted to be biodegradable. PLA may be industrially compostable, but since it doesn’t degrade easily in the environment, it demonstrates the potential to be a marine pollutant. The authors conclude that the common practice of referring to industrially compostable materials as “biodegradable plastic” could mislead consumers and increase the amount of plastic waste in the environment.

There is a tendency to assume that bioplastics are biodegradable since they are made from biological materials. However, if they are designed to mimic the structure of conventional plastics, they can last in the environment just as long. In fact, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) discourages the use of “bioplastic” and instead pushes for “bio-based polymer” to avoid misleading individuals that any polymer derived from biomass is inherently environmentally friendly.

Royer says potentially misleading terminology about what is biodegradable or not can affect the environment. Some consumers may think of “biodegradable” and “compostable” as interchangeable, but these materials can often end up in the waste stream just like conventional plastic items. To avoid misconceptions, companies promoting PLA can inform consumers how to use and dispose of their products and let them know the conditions under which the material will biodegrade. “This information should not be hidden and hard to find,” says Royer. “The right labeling is important as it is counterproductive to buy PLA and then discard it in the wrong way.”

In general, a material should be tested under different conditions and scenarios to assess its biodegradability, says Royer. More importantly, it must be tested “under realistic scenarios, such as the natural environment, where these types of materials might end up.” For instance, PLA can be biodegradable under composting facilities, while cellulose-based textile fibers can biodegrade under normal oceanic conditions, she adds.

[Related: Earthworms can break down bioplastic, for better or for worse.]

While the idea of bioplastics can be promising, they’re not the end-all solution. Addressing plastic pollution does not mean using more biodegradable and compostable plastics, but rather, generating less waste in general. Royer says PLA is used for single-use items most of the time, something consumers should avoid using at all costs. 

“Creating a product needs a lot of energy and resources, and using it only a few minutes and then discarding it does not make any sense,” she adds. “If consumers really need to buy a biodegradable bioplastic, then they should make sure to have access to composting facilities, which is not always easy.”

The post A popular ‘compostable’ bioplastic isn’t as biodegradable as it seems appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best Overall		Temtop M2000 2nd		SEE IT	The ability to test many things in one device, with consistent results and audible alerts, makes this monitor our top pick.
Best Smart		Atmotube Pro Portable		SEE IT	Impressive accuracy, and handy app alerts, help this keychain-sized monitor work well across a wide variety of temperatures and humidity.
Best Indoor Outdoor		Davis Instruments AirLink		SEE IT	This multienvironment-friendly unit offers easy-to-read graphs and charts, Weatherlink.com integration, and compatibility with Davis weather stations.

Nothing beats a breath of fresh air, but air can be contaminated by chemicals, soot, wildfire smoke, and other forest fire byproducts, making an air quality monitor a valuable tool. Even those with the best noses can have difficulty telling how good their local air is, especially with odorless gasses and “Volatile Organic Compounds” (VOCs) from products or processes lurking, so what are you to do? You could call in an air quality professional … or you can begin to do your own tracking with one of our picks for best air quality monitors.

• Best overall: Temtop M2000 2nd
• Best smart: Atmotube Pro Portable
• Best indoor outdoor: Davis Instruments AirLink
• Best portable: Sensirion SPS30
• Best budget: Temtop P20

How we selected the best air quality monitors

Largely, selecting the best air quality monitors was more a matter of hitting the research shelves than the shopping cart button. With such a product, the customer sentiment and manufacturer-supplied specs really mean a lot less than in-depth product analysis from researchers and experts that were able to compare consumer-facing products with laboratory-grade equipment. This results in a thin product selection, but I was able to identify five air quality monitors that I can confidently recommend.

The best air quality monitors: Reviews & Recommendations

What is the best air quality monitor? The best air quality monitors have been tested from official sources and come in various shapes, styles, and working methods. While the Temtop M2000 2nd Generation is the top pick for air quality monitor, due to its ease of use and robust testing ability, our four other monitors might be right for you depending on your circumstances. In any event, these five air quality monitors have both proper testing and current availability in the market.

Best overall: Temtop M2000 2nd Generation

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Why it made the cut: The Temtop M2000 2nd Generation tests for a wide variety of pollutants, has built-in calibration, and includes an audible alarm.

Specs

• Measures: CO2, HCHO (formaldehyde), PM2.5/PM10, Temp., Humidity
• AQ-SPEC report: High consistency
• Type: Handheld 

Pros

• Tests many things all in one device
• High consistency across many devices
• Has an audible alarm for when levels rise too high
• Tried and tested by several school systems

Cons

• Doesn’t work in temperatures below freezing

The Temtop M2000 2nd Generation is a relatively easily operated handheld air quality monitor that has been widely used. It has been used by the New York State Education Department, and the United Federation of Teachers has used it to measure carbon dioxide levels in schools in efforts to fight Covid-19.

The 2nd Generation product improves upon the original Temtop M2000 by adding a data export feature. This is really useful because, as mentioned by the AQ-SPEC report, where the Temtop M2000 2nd Generation suffers losses in accuracy, it makes up for it with high levels of consistency. Even across multiple Temtops, the reading levels should be consistently similar in the same situation. This means that you can pinpoint exactly when contaminant levels have started rising, even if you have to have a replacement device.

I’m also particularly pleased that it attempts a calibration system. While the accuracy, consistency, and difficulty for average users feel a bit daunting, the system’s overall capabilities are more than enough to begin with. Part of the calibration process being that you leave the device outside for lengthy periods is also annoying but manageable.

In reality, the main concern is the device’s limited capabilities during the colder months. Without being able to function below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the supposed “indoor-outdoor” nature of the device is cut off for many months of the year for those of us too far North or South of the equator. Luckily, in-home monitoring will still work year-round.

Finally, if you like the look of the M2000 2nd Generation, but are looking for something quite a bit cheaper, our budget choice also comes from Temtop. The Temtop P20 has reduced features but also a reduced price tag.

Best smart: Atmotube Pro Portable 

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Why it made the cut: The Atmotube Pro attaches directly to your backpack or belt clip and alerts your phone directly when there’s a problem.

Specs

• Measures: PM1/PM2.5/PM10, VOCs, Temp., Humidity, Barometric Pressure
• AQ-SPEC report: High accuracy, high precision
• Type: Wearable

Pros

• Impressive accuracy counts
• Handy app alerts
• Works well across a wide variety of temperatures and humidities
• Keychain size

Cons

• Shorter battery life than hoped for

The Atmotube Pro Portable is a keychain-size air quality monitor that won’t take up much space and can be put just about anywhere or come with you. All of the data collected will be at your fingertips via the Atmo app, available free for Android and iOS devices.

The app will give you your personal stats, access to personal and global maps, and a personalized series of articles to help you understand air quality. You can also export your device’s data as a CSV file for further analysis.

According to the Atmotube’s AQ-SPEC results, the device is quite accurate, ranging from 86% to 98% across various conditions. The AQ-SPEC report also notes that the device is highly consistent across various environmental conditions, saying that heat and humidity had “minimal effect” on the device’s precision. Despite its small size, the Atmotube Pro delivers at a high level.

One of the bigger disappointments with the Atmotube Pro is the battery life. As expected of such a small device, the battery is also quite tiny. When the device is set to take measurements only once every 30 minutes, you can squeeze about a week out of the little battery. However, when you crank that up just a notch, the battery dies much more quickly. This is very unfortunate when using a device that, by its very nature, you want to set up and forget about. Fortunately, if the device isn’t meant to be mobile, you can keep it plugged into the charger while it is running.

Best indoor outdoor: Davis Instruments AirLink

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Why it made the cut: The AirLink is made for both indoor and outdoor usage, provides beautiful charts, and works well with other Davis Instruments systems.

Specs

• Measures: AQI, Temp., Humidity, Dew Point, Heat Index
• AQ-SPEC report: Highly accurate for PM1.0/PM2.5, but not for PM10, consistent
• Type: Indoor or outdoor

Pros

• Weatherlink.com integration
• Easy-to-read graphs and charts
• Installs easily both indoors and out
• Integrates into your Davis weather station

Cons

• Poor PM10 reading

The Davis Instruments AirLink comes with a heavy-duty body that can be conveniently placed in indoor or outdoor environments. If you want it in your house, place the machine on a desk or table. It has four safety feet to reduce the chances of it sliding off smooth surfaces. Alternatively, mount it outside (near an outlet) and attach the provided weather-resistant cover.

If you’re into more than just air quality monitoring, you’ll really appreciate the extra things the AirLink tracks, such as dew point and heat index. You’ll also be happy to note that it will connect with weatherlink.com and can integrate with your other Davis weather station products. These services are also available on your phone via the WeatherLink app.

I really appreciate that the output looks professional but still feels closer to what you might expect from a cable weather station than what your average lab coat wearer would be reading. The only thing I was disappointed with is that, as per the AirLink’s AQ-SPEC report, the PM10 readings weren’t too accurate. Really, though, this is just a small trade-off for a good home system and typical consumers will be more than happy with this machine.

Best portable: Sensirion SPS30

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Why it made the cut: The Sensirion SPS30 is a no-frills machine dedicated to particulate matter testing.

Specs

• Measures: PM1.0/PM2.5/PM4.0/PM10
• AQ-SPEC report: High precision
• Type: Portable

Pros

• Small size
• 8-year lifetime
• Long-term stability and contamination-resistance
• Moddable

Cons

• Drab UI makes interpreting data difficult

If you want to feel like you’re really in the lab, the Sensirion SPS30 might be right up your alley. Right from the moment I opened the company’s product introduction video, I felt instantly reintroduced to the lab environment I once came from.

Where this really shines is the Sensirion SPS30’s great moddability. For example, some users are soldering them on bikes for CanAirIO, a citizen science project dedicated to building a citizen network for monitoring air quality worldwide. The simple USB port connection and loads of data quickly generated by the device lend it to lots of projects. Other possibilities include pairing it with air conditioners, smart home devices, HVAC equipment, and more.

Where this “lab environment feel” really doesn’t shine is the UI. If you’ve ever worked with in-company software or any niche data-collection devices, you probably already know what I mean. You sure get a lot of data, but it isn’t going to look beautiful or come easy to read. Check out the company’s demonstration video for an up-close look at the graphs provided by the machine before deciding whether to purchase.

As for the Sensirion SPS30’s AQ-SPEC report, the key thing to know is that the device is highly precise across temperatures and humidity levels. While PM1.0 and PM2.5 levels were highly accurately measured in field and laboratory testing, PM10 levels were shown to be highly inaccurate in the field trials.

Best budget: Temtop P20

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Why it made the cut: This budget solution will take care of all of your basic air quality monitoring needs.

Specs

• Measures: PM2.5, Temp., Humidity
• AQ-SPEC report: Higher precision at low temperatures
• Type: Desktop or mountable

Pros

• Highly accessible interface
• Everything needed for wall mounting included
• Can double as a nice desk or wall clock
• Exportable data

Cons

• Limited pollutants measured, but still great for price
• Low battery life

Considering that a laboratory-grade air quality tester can cost thousands of dollars, it would seem impossible to make a competitive one in the two-digit range. However, with Temtop’s P20, that isn’t true.

The Temtop P20 can measure PM2.5 pollutants. While it’d be nice to measure other pollutants or even other sizes of particulate matter, doing one thing well is quite impressive for the budget tier. The P20’s AQ-SPEC report tells us that the machine’s precision is most accurate when the local temperature is lower. That being said, the measurements indicate an accuracy of over 90% for most conditions at 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

You’ll probably enjoy having the Temtop P20 around, as it is also a rather nice LCD screen clock. To take a bit of the mystery out of the reading counts, a cute smiley face interprets the PM2.5 levels as good, fair, or poor. Another smiley face interprets your local humidity levels in a similar manner.

While the device can be mounted on the wall and includes the screws needed to do so, I recommend using the back stand and using it as a desk monitor. On the wall, the numbers, time, and smiley faces will probably prove somewhat tricky to see clearly. This will also help you keep it plugged into a charger because the battery only lasts for about 6-8 hours on a single charge.

Finally, those of you interested in data will rejoice. Much like the Temtop M2000 2nd Generation, our top choice of air quality monitor, the Temtop P20 has USB connectivity to export the collected data in CSV format. 

Things to consider before buying the best air quality monitors

One thing to note from the current research is that air quality monitors for public usage are still an emerging market. As such, there are a lot of claims about accuracy that are either demonstrably false or haven’t been thoroughly checked by scientists or any actual regulatory board. With all of this in mind, here are the key things to remember when buying an air quality monitor:

Target pollutant

In a fantasy world, an air quality monitor could sniff out any potential harm in the air and let you know. Unfortunately, air quality monitors in the real world must be designed to target specific contaminants. While it is never a mystery what pollutants an air quality monitor tracks—as they are nearly always prominently displayed in the specs and ads—you may find yourself overwhelmed with a few new terms. Here’s a quick mini-guide to get you up to speed on air pollution vocab:

PM: PM stands for “particulate matter” and measurements of it can tell you how many liquid or solid particles of varying sizes are in your air. The particles are measured in microns, given after the “PM.” For example, PM2.5 tests for the amount of particles that are approximately 2.5 microns in your air. The makers of the Atmotube report that PM1 particles are typically emissions from factories and vehicles, PM2.5 particles usually come from fires and combustion, and PM10 particles are from pollen, mold, and fine bits of old plants and insects. You’ll find that PM2.5 is a common measurement taken by portable air purifiers.

AQI: This stands for Air Quality Index and is a popular, but somewhat outdated, method for measuring air quality. Essentially, the AQI measures pollutant levels for a wide variety of substances, gives them each a score from 0-500, and reports the highest one. It doesn’t matter if only one pollutant is high or if several are, only the top one is getting reported. Still, the data is historically known and the conversions for each pollutant can still be useful. If you want to play around with the system, a handy AQI calculator is available for you.

VOCs: These are “Volatile Organic Compounds” and largely come from human sources. The EPA warns that sources of these contaminants include household cleaners, building materials, and standard office equipment. They also have found that these pollutants are consistently found in much higher concentrations in indoor settings. VOCs are a big part of why our recommended floor cleaners focused so heavily on ingredients. Certain high-end air purifiers, such as the Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde, are specifically equipped with sensors attuned to these byproducts we bring into our homes as we upgrade furnishings and electronics, etc.

Scientific usage

Before making any purchase of something as important as an air quality monitor, be sure to check out how the product is perceived by experts. That can be as simple as running a Google search with “site:.edu” or “site:.gov” followed by the product name or trawling through the depths of the “Air Quality Sensor Performance Evaluation Center” (AQ-SPEC) website.

AQ-SPEC provides comprehensive data on air sensors after real-world field trials. While AQ-SPEC reports explicitly state that they are not an endorsement of a particular monitor, the evaluations are free for the manufacturer if the sensors are “low-cost” and meet basic selection criteria. As a result, simply bothering to submit a sensor for an AQ-SPEC report is a sign of a manufacturer’s good faith in their product.

All of the air quality monitors on our list have a detailed AQ-SPEC report. Unfortunately, these reports can be a bit dense and read more like a Ph.D. journal submission than a consumer-facing report. I’ve attempted to condense these reports down into the relevant bits, but if you’ve got any interest, you’re highly encouraged to parse through them yourself as well.

Accuracy & consistency

Accuracy and consistency feel very similar at a glance but affect our perceptions of an air quality monitor in big ways. As you might be able to gather from a recent analysis by the Berkeley Lab, accuracy is going to be difficult to maintain. However, high consistency will make these machines still quite valuable sources of information for your home.

Part of this comes down to calibration, which laboratory equipment undergoes frequently. Take the humble pH machine, for example. Back in my lab days, I remember calibrating this machine nearly every day I would use it, using specialized liquid solutions. Now imagine calibrating something that measures air … at home. It appears that cheap calibration is on the way, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy or reliably done by the average person.

The result is that we have to expect some loss of accuracy when high-quality calibration isn’t feasible. Depending on what is being measured, this might not necessarily be too much of a problem. For example, your home thermometer is likely about 1 degree off, but it is still enough to tell you that you have a fever. The key is getting something accurate enough for your purposes.

Perhaps more important is consistency. While several consumer-grade air quality monitors have a bias, especially after being run for multiple days, if that bias is consistent, we can still get extremely useful information. For example, if your reading for Carbon Dioxide suddenly skyrockets above what you are used to getting, you know you have a problem.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best air quality monitors

• Best overall: Temtop M2000 2nd
• Best smart: Atmotube Pro Portable
• Best indoor outdoor: Davis Instruments AirLink
• Best portable: Sensirion SPS30
• Best budget: Temtop P20

Getting a high-quality air quality monitor doesn’t have to be for laboratory professionals alone. While the world of personal air quality monitoring is still emerging, there are still some great products out there. Combining the most stringent testing circumstances with ready commercial availability produced a list of exactly these five air quality monitors, so we’re sure customers will find satisfaction from something on this list.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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This article was originally published on ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Co-published with LAist and KVPR.

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Over the past decade, public awareness about climate change has grown, albeit gradually. As more people became eco-conscious, it isn’t surprising that the demand for environmentally friendly products has increased as well. According to the 2022 Sustainable Market Share Index, sustainability-marketed products now hold about a 17.3 percent share of the consumer packaged goods market, a significant increase from 13.7 percent back in 2015. Products marketed as sustainable also grew about twice as fast as conventionally marketed products from 2017 to 2022.

With more green products entering the market, it’s important to ensure that manufacturers do not mislead consumers when it comes to environmental claims. The Federal Trade Commission made the Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (or “Green Guides”) exactly for this purpose. First issued in 1992, the guide has been updated several times since then to keep marketers from making unsubstantiated claims.

[Related: How to actually recycle.]

Last month, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) submitted a comment about the Green Guides. According to the agency, the use of the resin identification code (RIC) with the recycling symbol—the familiar three chasing arrows—constitutes a misrepresentation of claims. Even though the RIC is meant to identify a product’s unique plastic resin type, consumers generally understand it to represent a universal recycling symbol. A 2019 report from the Consumer Brands Association found that 68 percent of Americans assume any product with the resin code and recycling symbol is recyclable.

“When the plastic industry co-opted the recycling symbol to label their plastic resins, they began a decades-long misinformation campaign to convince Americans that all plastic packaging is recyclable,” says Martin Bourque, executive director of the Ecology Center and co-founder of the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers (AMBR). “Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

The RIC refers to the type of plastic of which there are seven in total. However, “very little plastic packaging is even marginally recyclable,” says Bourque. According to Greenpeace, only polyethylene terephthalate (PET) #1 and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) #2 can be claimed as recyclable materials. They are the only types of plastic resin widely accepted by more than 350 material recovery facilities (MRF) across the country. Even if MRFs were to accept other types of plastic, that doesn’t ensure that they will be recycled—they might simply dispose of them.

Recycling contamination occurs when recyclable items are placed in the wrong bins or non-recyclable items end up in the recycling system. Local governments and MRFs face contamination issues in their daily operations, which is associated with consumer confusion about what is recyclable or not. The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit organization committed to building a circular economy, estimates that contamination costs the US recycling system at least $300 million annually. 

Bourque says the use of the chasing arrows with the RIC has undermined efforts at reducing plastic use, enabled even more single-use and disposable plastic packaging, and cost recyclers millions in collection, sorting, and disposal expenses. The EPA comment says that updating the recyclable claims section on the Green Guides may reduce consumer confusion and the financial burden of facilities receiving and incarcerating plastic materials they cannot recycle.

ASTM International, which administers the RIC system, revised the standard in 2013 and replaced the chasing arrows symbol with a solid equilateral triangle to bring the focus back to the purpose of resin identification and quality control before recycling. The state of California also passed SB 343 in 2021, which prohibits the use of the chasing arrows symbol on products that are not considered recyclable in accordance with statewide recyclability criteria. 

Having an equilateral triangle around the resin identification code is moderately better than the recycling symbol, says Bourque, but he recommends that California’s new labeling law be adopted on a national level since it requires any claims of recyclability (including the use of the chasing arrows symbol) to be backed up with proof.

The RIC system was not intended for consumers in the first place, but rather, for those who work in materials recovery and recycling facilities. In terms of getting more people on board with recycling, it may be helpful to establish consumer communication tools like new labels to indicate specifically whether a plastic material is recyclable or not, says Kate O’Neill, global environmental politics and governance expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It may also restore trust in the system and create more effective recycling practices from consumers, she adds.

[Related: Recycling plants spew a staggering amount of microplastics.]

To increase plastic recycling rates, it’s necessary to invest in recycling infrastructure, says O’Neill. The country’s recycling infrastructure hasn’t been keeping up with today’s waste steam. Last year, the EPA announced $375 million in funding for new recycling, reuse, and waste prevention programs and initiatives—the largest investment in recycling by the EPA in 30 years.

O’Neill says creating markets for recycled plastics could also help. In 2020, California passed AB 793 which requires plastic beverage containers to contain a minimum amount of recycled content. Starting in 2022, the amount of post-consumer recycled resin in plastic beverage containers should at least be 15 percent. The requirement increases to 25 percent by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030, thereby increasing the demand for recycled resin.

Although recycling is part of the solution when addressing plastic waste, O’Neill says it can’t be the panacea. The focus should still be on reducing plastic packaging, not recycling more, says Bourque. Targeting virgin plastic production and use can reduce further waste generation. “We cannot recycle our way out of the plastic packaging crisis,” he adds. “Remember, it goes ‘Reduce, Reuse, then Recycle!’”

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On May 25, the Supreme Court of the United States cut back the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate wetlands in another setback for the landmark Clean Water Act. In the 5 to 4 ruling, the court said that the law does not allow the EPA to regulate the discharges into the wetlands that are near a body of water, unless the wetland has a unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. 

[Related: The EPA’s roll back of the Clean Water Act could impact drinking water for millions of Americans.]

The issue before the court was the reach of the 51-year-old Clean Water Act and how courts should determine what counts as “waters of the United States” for the purposes of legal protection. In 2006, the court ruled in two consolidated cases that wetlands are protected by the Clean Water Act if they have a “significant nexus” to regulated waters. Business interests and property rights groups sought to narrow the regulations in wetlands and areas that are directly connected to “navigable waters,” like lakes and rivers.

This case–Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency–concerned Michael and Chantell Sackett, a couple who wanted to build a home on what an appeals court called “a soggy residential lot” near Priest Lake in Idaho’s panhandle. The Sacketts began construction in 2007 by filling in the land, and the EPA ordered them to stop. The agency threatened the couple with fines, saying  they must return their property to its original condition. Backed by successful conservative property rights group Pacific Legal Foundation, the Sacketts sued the EPA. A dispute regarding if the lawsuit was premature reached the Supreme Court in an earlier appeal and the justices ruled that the suit could proceed in 2012. Justice Alito said that the Clean Water Act gave the EPA too much power in a concurring opinion that same year.

Thursday’s 5 to 4 majority opinion is the latest decision in a trend where the conservative-leaning court has narrowed the reach of environmental regulations. In 2022, the court restricted the EPA’s authority to curb emissions from power plants in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the EPA’s interpretation of its power went too far. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett concurred that the Clean Water Act extends only to those “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own rights.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented, with Kagan writing a concurring opinion. They agreed that the Sacketts should prevail, but wrote that they would have ruled for them on more narrow grounds without changing what defines “waters in the United States.”

[Related: What would America be like without the EPA?]

In his own dissent, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “By narrowing the [Clean Water] Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”

Wetlands are some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on the planet and the US has roughly 75.5 million acres of wetlands. They are an important tool against slowing the pace of human-made climate change, particularly in urban areas, while protecting communities from flooding and storms. 

Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has dramatically cut pollution in America’s waterways, leading to major rebounds of fish species. Since the wetlands like those at the center of the Sackett case have a close relationship with the larger water system of streams and rivers, the court’s ruling has major potential to impact the health and quality of all waterways in the United States. 

“This decision will cause incalculable harm. Communities across the country will pay the price,” Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) President & CEO Manish Bapna said in a statement following the ruling. “What’s important now is to repair the damage. The government must enforce the remaining provisions of law that protect the clean water we all rely on for drinking, swimming, fishing, irrigation and more. States should quickly strengthen their own laws. Congress needs to act to restore protections for all our waters.”

Correction (May 30, 2023): Kagan wrote a concurring opinion, not the dissenting opinion as this originally stated. We regret the error.

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Update May 25, 2023: This post has been updated with a comment from Chevron.

The already questionable $2 billion a year voluntary emissions offset market is facing even more scrutiny. An investigation by transnational corporate watchdog Corporate Accountability first reported in The Guardian found that carbon offsets from fossil fuel giant Chevron are mostly worthless—could also cause harm. The investigation found that the company relies on “junk” carbon offsets and “unviable” technologies. These actions do little to offset the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new research from Corporate Accountability found that between 2020 and 2022, 93 percent of the offsets that Chevron bought and counted towards their climate targets from voluntary carbon markets were actually too environmentally problematic to be considered as anything other than worthless or junk.

[Related: Many popular carbon offsets don’t actually counteract emissions, study says.]

Carbon offsets are tradable “rights” or certificates that allow the buyer to compensate for 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gasses. These offsets are usually in the form of an investment in emissions-reducing environmental projects in other parts of the world. 

An investigation by The Guardian and Germany’s Die Zeit, and the nonprofit journalism outfit, SourceMaterial earlier this year found that the world’s leading provider of these offsets, Verra, may be making the climate worse. Verra is often used by major corporations like Shell and Disney, but over 90 percent of Verra’s most popular rainforest offset credits were discovered to be  “phantom credits” that do not result in “genuine carbon reductions.”

Carbon offsets are considered worthless or having low environmental integrity if the project is linked to a plantation, forest, or green energy project. This includes hydroelectric dams that don’t lead to any additional reductions in greenhouse gasses, or exaggerates the benefits and minimizes risks of emitting emissions, among some other factors.

Chevron often purchased offsets that focused on large dams, plantations, or forests, according to the report. It found that many of these “worthless” offsets are also linked to some alleged social and environmental harms. These harms are primarily in communities in the global south, which happen to face the most harm by the climate crisis that Big Oil helped create. 

“Chevron’s junk climate action agenda is destructive and reckless, especially in light of climate science underscoring the only viable way forward is an equitable and urgent fossil fuel phase-out,” Rachel Rose Jackson from Corporate Accountability told The Guardian.

Chevron is the second-largest fossil fuel company in the United States and its vast operations stretch north to Canada and the United Kingdom and south towards Brazil, Nigeria, and Australia. It reported over $35 billion in profits in 2022 and its projected emissions between 2022 and 2025 are equal to those from 364 coal-fired power plants per year. This is more than the total emissions of 10 European countries combined for a similar three-year period, according to the report.

[Related: BP made $28 billion last year, and now it’s backtracking on its climate goals.]

Chevron “aspires” to achieve net zero upstream emissions by 2050, largely relying on carbon offset schemes and carbon capture and storage to do this. Carbon offsets rely on environmental projects to cancel out a company’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new report further argues that the widespread use of these worthless offsets undermines the company’s net zero aspiration. Their net-zero aspirations only apply to less than 10 percent of the company’s carbon footprint–the upstream emissions that are produced from the production and transport of gas and oil. It excludes the downstream or end use emissions that are due to burning fossil fuels.

“Any climate plan that is premised on offsets, CCS, and excludes scope 3 [downstream] emissions is bound to fail,” Steven Feit, fossil economy legal and research manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian. “It’s clear from this report and other research that net zero as a framework opens the door for claims of climate action while continuing with business as usual, and not moving towards a low-carbon Paris [agreement]-aligned 1.5-degree [2.7 degree] future.”

Bill Turenne, an external affairs coordinator from Chevron, added via email that Chevron believes the report is “biased against our industry and paints an incomplete picture of Chevron’s efforts to advance a lower carbon future.” The offsets reviewed in the Corporate Accountability report are “compliance-grade offsets accepted by governments in the regions where we operate,” Turenne said.

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A new report finds that methane regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency  could spur job growth in Texas as oil and gas operators measure, monitor and mitigate the harmful greenhouse gas.

While Texas officials argue the methane regulations would kill jobs, the report, published today by the Texas Climate Jobs Project and the Ray Marshall Center at the University of Texas, Austin, found that new federal methane regulations could create between 19,000 and 35,000 jobs in the state. 

Oil and gas producing regions, including the Permian Basin, would need a significant workforce to detect methane leaks, replace components known to leak the gas and plug abandoned wells. Previous research shows the methane mitigation industry is already growing.

In the absence of state methane rules, the EPA’s draft methane rule, first issued in November 2021 and strengthened in a supplemental filing last November, along with a new methane fee under the Inflation Reduction Act, will have a major impact on oil and gas operations in the Lone Star state. 

“We want to show that environmental policies are not job killers,” said Christopher Agbo, research and policy coordinator for the Texas Climate Jobs Project, an affiliate of the Texas AFL-CIO. “You can create tens of thousands of good-paying, family-sustaining union jobs while also cutting back on emissions.”

Changing the Methane Narrative 

The EPA’s methane regulations, to be finalized later this year, would reduce methane emissions 87 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

Reducing methane emissions is one of the most effective short-term measures to slow the pace of climate change because methane traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide.

But Texas has been a stubborn opponent of federal methane regulations. In January 2021, shortly after Biden ordered the EPA to develop new methane rules, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order directing state agencies to use every legal avenue to oppose federal action challenging the “strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”

After the EPA released its draft methane rule in 2021, Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian issued a statement that “anti -oil and -gas policies will kill jobs, stifle economic growth, and make America more reliant o[n] foreign nations to provide reliable energy.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission submitted joint public comments to the EPA, referring to provisions of the proposed methane rules as “burdensome,” “economically unreasonable” and “onerous.”

The new report, Mitigating Methane in Texas, seeks to change the narrative on methane regulations in Texas, concluding that the methane mitigation sector could grow rapidly as new regulations go into effect. 

Slashing methane emissions in Texas would be a mammoth undertaking. The effort would require the creation of thousands of new jobs, from deploying drones to measure emissions to decommissioning orphaned wells to installing flare systems on storage tanks.

The report authors found that to comply with methane regulations, Texas would need at least 19,000 workers and up to as many as 35,000, which would add between six and nine percent to the number employed in the oil and gas industry in 2022.

“We are the largest emitter of methane in the country,” Agbo said. “So all this funding and regulations toward methane mitigation are going to play a huge role in Texas.”

He and co-author Greg Cumpton, of the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at UT Austin, found that methane mitigation would create long-term maintenance jobs in the oil and gas sector, including leak inspection and detection, leak repair and storage tank maintenance. Short-term replacement and abatement jobs would include replacing methane-emitting components like pneumatic controllers. 

The biggest labor demand would be in the Permian Basin, where the authors estimate addressing methane emissions would require an additional 7,556 jobs. The report authors urge new jobs in methane mitigation be unionized and protected under prevailing wage laws and other high road employment practices. 

“Part of ensuring that the jobs created in areas like the Permian Basin are good-paying jobs would be implementing Department of Labor-registered apprenticeship programs,” Agbo said. “There needs to be collaboration between labor unions, local, state and local governments, and also workforce development boards in the area.”

“A Big Growth Field”

Oil and gas operators around the world are already working to reduce methane emissions. Some turn to Austin-based SeekOps, a company that pairs sensor technology with autonomous drones to measure emissions. While many of the firm’s clients are in Europe—where methane regulations have been in effect for years—SeekOps expects its U.S. clientele to grow.

“It’s a big growth field,” said Paul Khuri, SeekOps vice president of business development. “Next year is going to be a huge year, because the IRA taxes start on Jan. 1.”

SeekOps currently has 30 employees, including data analysts, atmospheric scientists, software and hardware engineers and drone pilots. The company was founded in California but relocated to Austin to be closer to potential customers in the energy industry. 

Khuri said SeekOps clients include oil and gas companies that have voluntarily committed to emissions reductions, regardless of the local regulatory framework. He said he will be watching how the federal government enforces the new methane fees to gauge how much the methane mitigation industry could grow.

“That will be a really good indicator of where the market is going to head and see whether this will be a massive growth area,” Khuri said.

A 2021 Environmental Defense Fund report found that the methane mitigation sector was already growing rapidly. The report identified 215 firms manufacturing technology or providing services to manage methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The number of manufacturing firms had increased by 33 percent from 2014 to 2021 and the number of service firms had increased by 90 percent between 2017 and 2021.

The EDF report found that more companies mitigating methane had employees located in Texas than any other state. Companies headquartered in Texas include Solar Injection Systems in Odessa, which manufactures solar-powered chemical injection pumps; Cimarron Energy, an emissions control company in Houston, and CI Systems in Carrollton, which commercializes infrared remote sensing technology. 

Arvind Ravikumar, an engineering professor and co-director of the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab at UT Austin, said that oil and gas companies are facing pressure on multiple fronts to reign in methane emissions. More buyers of U.S. natural gas in Europe and Asia are tracking supply chain methane emissions and some utilities are seeking “certified natural gas” with lower associated methane emissions.

“Even if the EPA methane regulations were not in place, the majority of these emissions detection and reduction efforts would go on,” Ravikumar said.

Because methane emissions occur through venting and leaking, not combustion, direct on-site measurements are necessary, Ravikumar said. This bodes well for job creation.

“Methane mitigation or methane emissions detection is not something you can do remotely. You have to be on the ground,” he said. “What that means is you’re going to put a lot more people in some of the most remote, rural corners of the country.”

Ravikumar said many facets of methane measurement and accounting must still be ironed out. But he agreed the economic benefits to oil and gas producing regions of Texas cannot be overlooked.

“Having a policy that’s going to create jobs exclusively in remote parts of the country is really hard to do,” Ravikumar said. “And methane is one place where you can do that successfully.”

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In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey alerted the world that in the atmosphere high above the South Pole a giant hole was forming in the Earth’s protective ozone layer. World leaders swiftly assembled to work out a solution. Two years later, the United Nations agreed to ban the chemicals responsible for eroding the layer of the stratosphere that shields Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Known as the Montreal Protocol agreement, it is still one of the UN’s most widely ratified treaties.

The Montreal Protocol was a win for diplomacy and the stratosphere. But unbeknown to its signatories at the time, the agreement was also an unexpected ward against climate catastrophe. As new research shows, the aptly named ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) that created the hole over Antarctica are also responsible for causing 30 percent of the temperature increase we saw globally from 1955 to 2005.

Michael Sigmond, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada is the lead author of a new study calculating the greenhouse-trapping potency of ODSs. The substances’ contribution to global warming are, he says, “larger than most people have realized.”

The Montreal Protocol regulates nearly 100 ozone-eating chemicals. Many fall under the umbrella of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals popularized in the 1930s for use in spray cans, plastic foams, and refrigeration. Compared with the array of toxic, flammable alternatives they replaced, CFCs were seen as wonder chemicals, and by the early 1970s, the world was producing nearly one million tonnes of them each year.

CFCs are inert, so they don’t react with other gases. Instead, they tend to accumulate in the atmosphere and drift wherever the wind takes them, hanging around in the air for 85 years or more. Once they reach the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth’s multilayered atmosphere, CFCs begin to break down. They’re “destroyed by being blasted apart by photons,” explains Dennis Hartmann, a climate scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. That reactive ruckus is what causes the hole in the ozone layer.

In the troposphere—the lowest level of the atmosphere, which fewer photons reach—ODSs act as long-lasting greenhouse gases. Back in 1987, scientists knew ODSs trapped some solar radiation, but they didn’t know how much. Only recently have scientists been putting together the evidence that ODSs are actually one of the most damaging warming agents of the past half century.

The effects of this warming are amplified at the poles. Sigmond and his colleagues’ work shows that if ODSs had never been mass produced—if the concentration in the atmosphere had stayed at 1955 levels—the Arctic today would be at least 55 percent cooler, and there’d be 45 percent more sea ice each September.

ODS production leveled off in the 1990s. But because they’re so long-lived, these gases are still kicking around, and the warming they cause is still increasing. Yet it could have been much worse. By banning ODSs, the Montreal Protocol unintentionally prevented 1 °C of warming by 2050.

With the Montreal Protocol, world leaders rallied around an urgent cause. In the process, we inadvertently phased out the second-largest forcer of global warming. The unanticipated benefits for the global climate, says Susann Tegtmeier, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Saskatchewan who was not involved in the study, “can be considered a very welcome and very positive side effect.”

While it’s taken a lot more negotiation and innovation to begin dislodging the main driver of climate change—carbon dioxide—the Montreal Protocol proves the power of collective action and shows how tackling environmental woes can help us in ways we didn’t expect.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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On May 11, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will propose new limits on the greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants. Second only to the nation’s transportation sector, the electricity sector generates about 25 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution in the US. 

[Related: Renewable energy is climbing in the US, but so are our emissions—here’s why.]

According to the EPA, the proposal for coal and new natural gas power plants would keep up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide from spilling into the air through 2042. This is the equivalent to reducing the annual emissions of about half the cars in the United States. The EPA estimates that the net climate and health benefits of these new standards on new gas and existing coal-fired power plants are up to $85 billion through 2042.

“By proposing new standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, EPA is delivering on its mission to reduce harmful pollution that threatens people’s health and wellbeing,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement. “EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future. Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people—cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”

The new rules will likely not mandate the use of technologies that capture carbon emissions before they leave a smokestack, such as direct air capture. It will instead set caps on pollution rates that planet operators will have to meet by either using a different technology or switching to a fuel source like green hydrogen. 

The new limits represent the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort to date to roll back the pollution from the US’ second-largest contributor to climate change. It also follows the current administration’s plans to cut car tailpipe emissions by speeding up the transition to mostly elective vehicles and curb methane leaks from gas and oil wells.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is adding over $370 billion into clean energy programs and the administration hopes that these new actions push the US further in the fight to constrain further human-made global warming.  

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier.]

These investments and regulations could put the US on track to meet President Biden’s pledge that the US will cut greenhouse gasses in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. While more policies are needed to reach the 2050 target, scientists say these goals must be met by all major industrialized nations to keep average global temperatures from increasing by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre industrial levels. Beyond that temperature tipping point, catastrophic flooding, drought, heat waves, flooding, species extinction, and crop failure will become significantly harder for humanity to handle. Earth has already warmed by two degrees Fahrenheit.

If these regulations are finalized, they would mark the first time that the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. It extends to all current and future electric plants as well. 

The plan will face steep opposition from the fossil fuel industry and Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

Despite these proposed new regulations, Biden has also faced criticism from many environmentalists for the decision to approve the Willow oil project in Alaska this March. Environmental groups call this massive oil drilling plan by ConocoPhillips a “carbon bomb” that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day. 

Many younger voters and young climate activists say Biden broke a major 2020 campaign promise by approving Willow. With this in mind, EPA officials will announce these new regulations at the University of Maryland.

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Back in 2021, President Joe Biden announced the administration’s new Justice40 Initiative through Executive Order 14008. The program’s aim is that 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities. Investments related to climate change, clean energy, reduction of legacy pollution, and the development of water and wastewater infrastructure, among others, all fall within the initiative.

The administration doesn’t intend the program to be a one-time investment, but rather, a way to improve the distribution of the benefits of government programs and ensure that they reach disadvantaged communities. Since it was established, 19 federal agencies have released a total of nearly 470 covered programs, with three agencies joining just last month. While it’s promising that the administration recognizes the need to address long-standing equities, it’s critical to assess how they plan to make environmental justice a reality.

Marginalized and underserved communities must be prioritized to advance environmental justice

Hannah Perls, senior staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program (EELP), says that many of the environmental injustices around the country today are the result of a legacy of disinvestment in low-income communities. This is especially true in communities of color where “racist policies barred or discouraged public and private investment in housing, critical infrastructure, public transit, and natural spaces.”

[Related: Stronger pollution protections mean focusing on specific communities.]

These communities often face greater exposure to industrial pollution, higher health risks from deteriorating infrastructure, and more energy and housing burdens than wealthier, white communities, says Perls. They also lose out often in competitive federal funding processes—and in some cases, funding is intentionally withheld. This only reinforces existing wealth disparities. By explicitly targeting that 40 percent of federal climate investments reach these communities, the Justice 40 Initiative hopes to combat the legacy of disinvestment and equitably distribute the benefits of the transition to renewable energy, she adds.

To identify disadvantaged communities, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) has put out its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a geospatial mapping tool that identifies overburdened and underserved census tracts across all states.

“Agencies can build upon the CEJST as needed, again on a program-by-program basis,” says Perls. “One benefit of this flexibility is that agencies can incorporate burdens specific to their jurisdiction. For example, the Department of Energy’s definition incorporates five measures of energy burden and two measures of fossil dependence.”

The CEJST is an exciting starting point that the federal government can continue to refine. That said, “environmental justice burdens don’t necessarily follow census boundaries, so there should be opportunities for communities to make the case to receive federal dollars if their community is not identified by the tool,” says Silvia R. González, director of climate change, environmental justice, and health research at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

How to ensure that the benefits reach disadvantaged communities

All covered programs are required to consult the community stakeholders, ensure their involvement in determining program benefits, and report data on said benefits. An established number of 40 percent provides clear guidelines and expectations for agencies. To strengthen that goal, a team of researchers and advocates recommend that the 40 percent be a minimum for direct investments in disadvantaged communities.

“A direct investment means the percentage is not just a goal that relies on counting trickle-down benefits,” says González, who was involved in the report. “The straightforward nature of a direct benefit strategy would enhance transparency and accountability to taxpayers because it is tough to measure trickle-down benefits.”

To ensure investment objectives are met, transparency in reporting and evaluation is necessary, she adds. Accountability mechanisms are a must in guaranteeing equitable, effective, and efficient implementation.

[Related: The hard truth of building clean solar farms.]

“We currently have no federal environmental justice law,” says Perls. “As a result, most of the administration’s environmental justice commitments, including the Justice40 Initiative, are established via Executive Order and are therefore not judicially enforceable.”

Fortunately, there are some ways to monitor how the government is living up to its promises. The administration recently published the first version of the Environmental Justice Scorecard, a government-wide assessment of the actions taken by federal agencies to achieve environmental justice goals. Harvard Law School’s EELP also has a Federal Environmental Justice Tracker that tracks the progress of the administration’s environmental justice commitments and other agency-specific initiatives.

Overall, experts say it’s a positive sign that the Justice40 Initiative has catalyzed critical discussions to face climate change and historical disinvestment head-on. But as with any ambitious policy agenda, the implementation will need to overcome many hurdles, says González. The most vulnerable communities tend to be those that are least resourced, and they should not get left behind. Some communities or households may be under-resourced due to language, technology, trust, and capacity barriers to programs that can help them develop financial and health resiliency. There will need to be capacity-building and technical assistance for under-resourced communities to apply for and manage these investments, she adds.

In general, there is strong potential for Justice40-covered programs to bring transformational change from the bottom up. The knowledge and lived experiences of disadvantaged communities could shape targeted investments to ensure that their needs are met. “I hope Justice40 builds a framework rooted in principles of self-governance and self-determination, direct engagement, and collaboration with communities,” says González, “instead of top-down solutions.”

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An unsettling report released barely a year ago painted a grim picture of the plastics industry—only about 5 percent of the 46 million annual tons of plastic waste in the US makes it to recycling facilities. The number is even more depressing after realizing that is roughly half of experts’ previous estimates. But if all that wasn’t enough, new information throws a heaping handful of salt on the wound: of the plastic that does make it to recycling, a lot of it is still released into the world as potentially toxic microplastics.

According to the pilot study recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances focused on a single, modern facility, recycling plants’ wastewater contains a staggering number of microplastic particles. And as Wired explained on Friday, all those possibly toxic particulates have to go somewhere, i.e. potentially city water systems, or the larger environment.

The survey focusing on one new, unnamed facility examined its entire recycling process. This involves sorting, shredding, and melting plastics down into pellets. During those phases of recycling, however, the plastic waste is washed multiple times, which subsequently sheds particles smaller than 5 millimeters along the way. Despite factoring in the plant’s state-of-the-art filtration system designed to capture particulates as tiny as 50 microns, the facility still produced as many as 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater.

[Related: How companies greenwash their plastic pollution.]

The silver lining here is that without the filtration systems, it could be much worse. Researchers estimated facilities that utilized filters cut down their microplastic residuals from 6.5 million pounds to around 3 million pounds per year. Unfortunately, many recycling locations aren’t as equipped as the modern plant used within the study. On top of that, the team only focused on microplastics as small as 1.6 microns; particles can get so small they actually enter organisms’ individual cells. This implies much more plastic escapes these facilities than previously anticipated.

“I really don’t want it to suggest to people that we shouldn’t recycle, and to give it a completely negative reputation,” Erina Brown, a plastics scientist at the University of Strathclyde, told Wired. “What it really highlights is that we just really need to consider the impacts of the solutions.”

Most experts agree that the most important way to minimize coating the entire planet in microplastics is to focus on the larger issue—reducing society’s reliance on plastics in general, and pursuing alternative materials. In the meantime, recycling remains an important part of sustainability, as long as both facilities do everything they can to minimize microscopic waste.

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Dead fish were everywhere, speckling the beach near town and extending onto the surrounding coastline. The sheer magnitude of the October 2021 die-off, when hundreds, possibly thousands, of herring washed up, is what sticks in the minds of the residents of Kotzebue, Alaska. Fish were “literally all over the beaches,” says Bob Schaeffer, a fisherman and elder from the Qikiqtaġruŋmiut tribe.

Despite the dramatic deaths, there was no apparent culprit. “We have no idea what caused it,” says Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue. He wonders if the die-off was a symptom of a problem he’s had his eye on for the past 15 years: blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, that have become increasingly noticeable in the waters around this remote Alaska town.

Kotzebue sits about 40 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, on Alaska’s western coastline. Before the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue had his name attached to the place in the 1800s, the region was called Qikiqtaġruk, meaning “place that is almost an island.” One side of the two-kilometer-long settlement is bordered by Kotzebue Sound, an offshoot of the Chukchi Sea, and the other by a lagoon. Planes, boats, and four-wheelers are the main modes of transportation. The only road out of town simply loops around the lagoon before heading back in.

In the middle of town, the Alaska Commercial Company sells food that’s popular in the lower 48—from cereal to apples to two-bite brownies—but the ocean is the real grocery store for many people in town. Alaska Natives, who make up about three-quarters of Kotzebue’s population, pull hundreds of kilograms of food out of the sea every year.

“We’re ocean people,” Schaeffer tells me. The two of us are crammed into the tiny cabin of Schaeffer’s fishing boat in the just-light hours of a drizzly September 2022 morning. We’re motoring toward a water-monitoring device that’s been moored in Kotzebue Sound all summer. On the bow, Ajit Subramaniam, a microbial oceanographer from Columbia University, New York, Whiting, and Schaeffer’s son Vince have their noses tucked into upturned collars to shield against the cold rain. We’re all there to collect a summer’s worth of information about cyanobacteria that might be poisoning the fish Schaeffer and many others depend on.

Huge colonies of algae are nothing new, and they’re often beneficial. In the spring, for example, increased light and nutrient levels cause phytoplankton to bloom, creating a microbial soup that feeds fish and invertebrates. But unlike many forms of algae, cyanobacteria can be dangerous. Some species can produce cyanotoxins that cause liver or neurological damage, and perhaps even cancer, in humans and other animals.

Many communities have fallen foul of cyanobacteria. Although many cyanobacteria can survive in the marine environment, freshwater blooms tend to garner more attention, and their effects can spread to brackish environments when streams and rivers carry them into the sea. In East Africa, for example, blooms in Lake Victoria are blamed for massive fish kills. People can also suffer: in an extreme case in 1996, 26 patients died after receiving treatment at a Brazilian hemodialysis center, and an investigation found cyanotoxins in the clinic’s water supply. More often, people who are exposed experience fevers, headaches, or vomiting.

When phytoplankton blooms decompose, whole ecosystems can take a hit. Rotting cyanobacteria rob the waters of oxygen, suffocating fish and other marine life. In the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea, cyanobacterial blooms contribute to deoxygenation of the deep water and harm the cod industry.

As climate change reshapes the Arctic, nobody knows how—or if—cyanotoxins will affect Alaskan people and wildlife. “I try not to be alarmist,” says Thomas Farrugia, coordinator of the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, which researches, monitors, and raises awareness of harmful algal blooms around the state. “But it is something that we, I think, are just not quite prepared for right now.” Whiting and Subramaniam want to change that by figuring out why Kotzebue is playing host to cyanobacterial blooms and by creating a rapid response system that could eventually warn locals if their health is at risk.

Whiting’s cyanobacteria story started in 2008. One day while riding his bike home from work, he came across an arresting site: Kotzebue Sound had turned chartreuse, a color unlike anything he thought existed in nature. His first thought was, Where’s this paint coming from?

The story of cyanobacteria on this planet goes back about 1.9 billion years, however. As the first organisms to evolve photosynthesis, they’re often credited with bringing oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere, clearing the path for complex life forms such as ourselves.

Over their long history, cyanobacteria have evolved tricks that let them proliferate wildly when shifts in conditions such as nutrient levels or salinity kill off other microbes. “You can think of them as sort of the weedy species,” says Raphael Kudela, a phytoplankton ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Most microbes, for example, need a complex form of nitrogen that is sometimes only available in limited quantities to grow and reproduce, but the predominant cyanobacteria in Kotzebue Sound can use a simple form of nitrogen that’s found in virtually limitless quantities in the air.

Cyanotoxins are likely another tool that help cyanobacteria thrive, but researchers aren’t sure exactly how toxins benefit these microbes. Some scientists think they deter organisms that eat cyanobacteria, such as bigger plankton and fish. Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, favors another hypothesis: that toxins shield cyanobacteria from the potentially damaging astringent byproducts of photosynthesis.

Around the time when Kotzebue saw its first bloom, scientists were realizing that climate change would likely increase the frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, and what’s more, that blooms could spread from fresh water—long the focus of research—into adjacent brackish water. Kotzebue Sound’s blooms probably form in a nearby lake before flowing into the sea.

The latest science on cyanobacteria, however, had not reached Kotzebue in 2008. Instead, officers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game tested the chartreuse water for petroleum and its byproducts. The tests came back negative, leaving Whiting stumped. “I had zero idea,” he says. It was biologist Lisa Clough, then from East Carolina University and now with the National Science Foundation, with whom Whiting had previously collaborated, who suggested he consider cyanobacteria. The following year, water sample analysis confirmed she was correct.

In 2017, Subramaniam visited Kotzebue as part of a research team studying sea ice dynamics. When Whiting learned that Subramaniam had a long-standing interest in cyanobacteria, “we just immediately clicked,” Subramaniam says.

The 2021 fish kill redoubled Whiting and Subramaniam’s enthusiasm for understanding how Kotzebue Sound’s microbial ecosystem could affect the town. A pathologist found damage to the dead fish’s gills, which may have been caused by the hard, spiky shells of diatoms (a type of algae), but the cause of the fish kill is still unclear. With so many of the town’s residents depending on fish as one of their food sources, that makes Subramaniam nervous. “If we don’t know what killed the fish, then it’s very difficult to address the question of, Is it safe to consume?” he says.

I watch the latest chapter of their collaboration from a crouched position on the deck of Schaeffer’s precipitously swaying fishing boat. Whiting reassures me that the one-piece flotation suit I’m wearing will save my life if I end up in the water, but I’m not keen to test that theory. Instead, I hold onto the boat with one hand and the phone I’m using to record video with the other while Whiting, Subramaniam, and Vince Schaeffer haul up a white-and-yellow contraption they moored in the ocean, rocking the boat in the process. Finally, a metal sphere about the diameter of a hula hoop emerges. From it projects a meter-long tube that contains a cyanobacteria sensor.

The sensor allows Whiting and Subramaniam to overcome a limitation that many researchers face: a cyanobacterial bloom is intense but fleeting, so “if you’re not here at the right time,” Subramaniam explains, “you’re not going to see it.” In contrast to the isolated measurements that researchers often rely on, the sensor had taken a reading every 10 minutes from the time it was deployed in June to this chilly September morning. By measuring levels of a fluorescent compound called phycocyanin, which is found only in cyanobacteria, they hope to correlate these species’ abundance with changes in water qualities such as salinity, temperature, and the presence of other forms of plankton.

Researchers are enthusiastic about the work because of its potential to protect the health of Alaskans, and because it could help them understand why blooms occur around the world. “That kind of high resolution is really valuable,” says Malin Olofsson, an aquatic biologist from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who studies cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea. By combining phycocyanin measurements with toxin measurements, the scientists hope to provide a more complete picture of the hazards facing Kotzebue, but right now Subramaniam’s priority is to understand which species of cyanobacteria are most common and what’s causing them to bloom.

Farrugia, from the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network, is excited about the possibility of using similar methods in other parts of Alaska to gain an overall view of where and when cyanobacteria are proliferating. Showing that the sensor works in one location “is definitely the first step,” he says.

Understanding the location and potential source of cyanobacterial blooms is only half the battle: the other question is what to do about them. In the Baltic Sea, where fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture has exacerbated blooms, neighboring countries have put a lot of effort into curtailing that runoff—and with success, Olofsson says. Kotzebue is not in an agricultural area, however, and instead some scientists have hypothesized that thawing permafrost may release nutrients that promote blooms. There’s not much anyone can do to prevent this, short of reversing the climate crisis. Some chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, show promise as ways to kill cyanobacteria and bring temporary relief from blooms without affecting ecosystems broadly, but so far chemical treatments haven’t provided permanent solutions.

Instead, Whiting is hoping to create a rapid response system so he can notify the town if a bloom is turning water and food toxic. But this will require building up Kotzebue’s research infrastructure. At the moment, Subramaniam prepares samples in the kitchen at the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge’s office, then sends them across the country to researchers, who can take days, sometimes even months, to analyze them. To make the work safer and faster, Whiting and Subramaniam are applying for funding to set up a lab in Kotzebue and possibly hire a technician who can process samples in-house. Getting a lab is “probably the best thing that could happen up here,” says Schaeffer. Subramaniam is hopeful that their efforts will pay off within the next year.

In the meantime, interest in cyanobacterial blooms is also popping up in other regions of Alaska. Emma Pate, the training coordinator and environmental planner for the Norton Sound Health Corporation, started a monitoring program after members of local tribes noticed increased numbers of algae in rivers and streams. In Utqiaġvik, on Alaska’s northern coast, locals have also started sampling for cyanobacteria, Farrugia says.

Whiting sees this work as filling a critical hole in Alaskans’ understanding of water quality. Regulatory agencies have yet to devise systems to protect Alaskans from the potential threat posed by cyanobacteria, so “somebody needs to do something,” he says. “We can’t all just be bumbling around in the dark waiting for a bunch of people to die.” Perhaps this sense of self-sufficiency, which has let Arctic people thrive on the frozen tundra for millennia, will once again get the job done.

The reporting for this article was partially funded by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Mentored Science Journalism Project Fellowship.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Plunging into the ocean or a lake is one of the great joys of summer. But arriving at the beach to find water that’s green, red or brown, and possibly foul-smelling, can instantly spoil the party.

As a toxicologist, I study health risks from both synthetic and natural substances. I’ve conducted research into early detection of harmful algal blooms, or HABs, which are an increasing threat to humans, animals and the environment.

Toxins produced during these blooms have been implicated in human and animal illnesses in at least 43 states. Scientists have estimated that in the U.S. alone, freshwater HABs cause more than US$4.6 billion in damage yearly. Here’s what to know about them if you’re bound for the water’s edge this summer.

Tiny organisms, big impacts

Algae and cyanobacteria – often called blue-green algae – are simple, plantlike organisms that live in water. They can grow out of control, or “bloom,” especially when the water is warm and slow moving. Climate change is making water bodies warmer, increasing the risk of HABs.

The other major factor that drives blooms is high levels of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which fertilize algae. Nutrient pollution comes mainly from agriculture, wastewater treatment plants, septic systems and fossil fuel combustion.

Sometimes these blooms contain organisms that produce toxins – an umbrella term for many poisonous substances that come from animals or plants and can make people and animals sick and adversely affect the environment. These events are called harmful algal blooms.

HABs occur throughout the U.S. and worldwide, in both saltwater and freshwater environments. They pose significant health risks to human, pets, livestock and wildlife; damage ecosystems; increase water treatment costs; restrict recreational activities; and cut into economic revenues.

People and animals can be exposed to HAB toxins through many routes. These include skin contact during activities such as swimming or boating; inhaling airborne droplets that contain toxins; swallowing contaminated water; or eating food or supplements that contain toxins. The most severe effects generally result from consuming contaminated seafood.

An array of toxins

There are numerous HAB toxins, including substances such as microcystin, saxitoxin, cylindrospermopsin, anatoxin-A and domoic acid. Each has a different action on the body, so HABs can have diverse harmful effects.

Typical symptoms of illness from exposure to HAB toxins can include stomach pain, vomiting or diarrhea; headache, fever, tiredness or other general symptoms; skin, eye, nose or throat irritation; and neurological symptoms such as muscle weakness or dizziness. Depending on the toxin, higher levels of exposure can result in tremors or seizures, respiratory distress, kidney toxicity, liver toxicity and even death.

As with many environmental exposures, children and older people may be especially sensitive to HAB toxins. People who regularly consume seafood caught in HAB-prone areas are also at risk of long-term health effects from potentially frequent, low-level exposures to HAB toxins.

Recognizing and responding to HABs

It’s not possible to tell whether a bloom is harmful just by looking at it, but there are some warning signs. If the water appears green, red, brown or yellowish in color; has a strong musty or fishy odor; has foam, scum, algal mats or paintlike streaks on the surface; or if there are dead fish or other marine life in the water or washed up on the shoreline, it’s likely that a HAB may be occurring.

If you are unsure whether a bloom is harmful or not, contact your local health department or environmental agency for guidance. As a general rule, it’s good to check with local agencies to see whether there are any relevant warnings when you go to the beach.

If you are notified of a bloom in a nearby body of water or in your public drinking water supply, the most important thing you can do to reduce your chances of getting sick is to follow local or state guidance. If you see signs of a bloom, stay out of the water and keep your pets out of the water.

It’s also important to follow local guidelines about consuming seafood caught through recreational fishing. It’s important to be aware that cooking contaminated seafood or boiling contaminated water does not destroy the toxins.

Be informed

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides resources and recommendations related to HABs and ways to stay safe. Pet owners should also learn how to protect their dogs from HABs.

Other federal agencies that offer information about HABs include the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Many states conduct HAB monitoring programs, especially in areas that are known to be vulnerable to blooms, such as western Lake Erie. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offers HAB resources by state. Apps used by water quality managers and state officials who make management decisions about public water supply safety, including CyAN Android and CyANWeb, may contain useful information about HABs in your area.

What’s being done about HABs?

Many efforts are underway to prevent, control and mitigate HABs and provide early warnings to water system managers and health officials.

One example in the U.S. is the
Cyanobacteria Assessment Network, or CyAN, a collaborative effort across several government agencies to develop an early warning indicator system to detect algal blooms in freshwater systems. There are also several ongoing projects for HAB forecasting by region.

At the global scale, the Harmful Algal Information System will eventually include harmful algal events and information from harmful algae monitoring and management systems worldwide.

Citizen scientists can provide invaluable help by monitoring local waters. If you would like to participate, consider joining the Phytoplankton Monitoring Network or the Cyanobacteria Monitoring Collaborative, and download and use the
Cyanobacterial bloom app to report potential HABs in bodies of water you visit.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Europe’s fourth busiest airport wants to ground private jet setters for good, making an unprecedented move that could set a new industry benchmark in tackling global travel emissions. In order to achieve the high-profile goal, however, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has a very bumpy journey ahead of it.

Per Bloomberg, the Netherlands’ largest air hub first made headlines last month when it announced plans to shutter all night flights and private jets from its runways beginning in 2026. Schiphol is overseen by the Royal Schiphol Group, a Dutch government majority-owned company whose interim CEO said at the time they “realize that our choices may have significant implications for the aviation industry, but they are necessary. This shows we mean business.”

[Related: The FAA just made East Coast flights shorter.]

On Tuesday, Schiphol Airport representatives explained to Bloomberg that 30 and 50 percent of all its private jet flights are to holiday locales such as Cannes and Ibiza. Additionally, around 17,000 private flights passed through Schiphol last year, “causing a disproportionate amount of noise and generating 20 times more carbon dioxide emissions per passenger than commercial flights.”

A private jet can emit as much as two metric tons of CO2 during one hour of flight. And while private flights make up only four percent of global aviation carbon emissions, the richer half of humanity is still behind roughly 90 percent of all air travel pollution. Factor in the dramatic rise in private air travel, particularly since the onset of the COVID–19 pandemic, and it’s easy to see why public sentiment is turning against the notion of wealthy getaways and exclusive business jaunts.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

Many in the industry, however, aren’t thrilled by Schiphol’s new goals. One private jet charter company CEO argued to Bloomberg that their customers’ flights were mostly for “business,” while other critics argued passengers will simply transition to nearby alternative airports. The Royal Schiphol Group informed Bloomberg its closest neighbor, Rotterdam The Hague Airport, cannot accommodate the displaced flights, nor does the company plan to transfer flights elsewhere.

Royal Schiphol Group could face an uphill battle in accomplishing its goals, however. Most of its impending green goals require discussions with the company’s stakeholders—such as Delta Air Lines and France-KLM, who previously sued the Dutch government regarding caps on flights. Then there’s Transavia Airlines BV, who oversee the majority of night flights out of Schiphol. Regardless of the final outcomes, Royal Schiphol Group is still setting a very public example when it comes to raising awareness regarding air travel’s exorbitant effects on the planet, and the importance of finding solutions to these issues before it’s too late.

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Over the last four decades, global water use has increased by about 1 percent per year. This rise is driven by many factors, including population growth, changing consumption patterns, and socioeconomic development. By 2050, the United Nations Water estimates urban water demand to increase by 80 percent. As freshwater needs continue to rise in cities, the sustainable management of urban water supply becomes even more critical.

In the past two decades, over 80 metropolitan cities around the world have experienced water shortages and extreme drought. Such urban water crises are expected to occur more frequently in the near future, therefore it’s crucial to understand how they unfold, who is vulnerable to them, and how they can be addressed.

Why urban water crises occur today

Many factors contribute to the development of today’s water crises, including changing land cover and use, urban infrastructure maintenance, and climate change, says Adriana Zuniga-Teran, neighborhood design and environmental sciences expert and assistant professor of geography, development, and environment at the University of Arizona.

For instance, impervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt often replace natural porous land cover as cities grow, resulting in less precipitation infiltration, which can affect the whole hydrological cycle. In addition, cities, farms, mines, and industrial land use all consume a lot of water compared to natural landscapes. Furthermore, rich and poor countries alike face issues with aging water infrastructure, which requires a massive amount of resources to upgrade. Lastly, climate change factors in because extreme weather events can make water more polluted, scarce, and/or unpredictable.

[Related: Groundwater is an incredible resource. It’s time to treat it like one.]

In general, Zuniga-Teran says the reasons for urban water crises are, to an extent, caused by “a consequence of uncontrolled urban growth and the unsustainable use of water resources.”

Population growth is not enough to indicate water demand, because certain individuals and social groups use a lot of water (and other resources) while other groups don’t. What’s at play is the current political-economic system that makes it possible for some individuals to over consume water while others don’t even have access to it, says Elisa Savelli, a research fellow at the Uppsala University Department of Earth Sciences in Sweden.

Socioeconomic inequalities can drive water crises

According to a recent Nature Sustainability study on the metropolitan area of Cape Town, stark socioeconomic inequalities play a major role in the production of water crises. The authors built a model to account for unequal water consumption across different social groups, which allowed them to retrace who over consume water and who doesn’t. They found that privileged households with better access and financial resources are able to consume more water to use however they want to.

“We found that whilst constituting only 13 percent of the urban population, the elite consumed more than half of the city’s water, and for non-basic needs such as gardening or swimming pools,” says Savelli, who was lead author of the Nature study.

Not only did wealthier households consume more public water sources, but they also had access to private sources that aren’t controlled by municipalities, like boreholes. In comparison, informal dwellers and lower-income households constitute over 60 percent of the city population but consume only about 27 percent of the city’s water. 

“Socioeconomic inequalities can drive water shortages and crises as much as, if not more than, population growth or climate change,” says Savelli. The current political-economic system triggers the unsustainable exploitation of water sources with the objective of accumulating profit and capital, without accounting for water as a common resource, she adds.

Wealthy people generally have the infrastructure to make water available to them, so it’s easier for them to consume it. They also have larger properties to maintain, larger dwelling units, pools, and more, says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA.

“In places like the Southwest, we need to aggressively change outdoor landscapes,” says Pincetl. In California, landscape irrigation accounts for about 50 percent of annual residential water consumption. Overall, federal and local governments have a responsibility to manage urban water supplies sustainably and equitably.

Various strategies to manage urban water supply sustainably

To ensure more sustainable management of urban water supply, Pincetl suggests establishing tiered water rates where rates are higher with more consumption. Water use budgets per household are already in some places across the country, like Orange County, California. Those who stay within their monthly water budget get a lower rate per centum cubic feet (CCF) compared to those who go over it.

A 2021 Water Economics and Policy study looked into the county’s application of tiered rates and found that water was saved for the two agencies that converted to a budget-based rate structure at multiple levels of consumption. However, Zuniga-Teran says water demand policies that aim to control human behavior might not be enough to influence the behavior of wealthy residents. After all, they may not mind paying a lot more for water.

Municipalities can also acquire water rights by buying farmlands to change the water use from agricultural to municipal, says Zuniga-Teran. Back in the 1970s, Tucson, Arizona purchased over 20,000 acres of farmland in Avra Valley to acquire water rights and preserve groundwater. Investing in education and communication programs to help individuals learn how they can contribute to sustainable water management is also important, she adds. A 2022 Sustainability study in Mexico aimed to implement an environmental education program on water conservation in 10-year-old students. The authors found that such environmental programs can improve water use and conservation.

[Related: A new climate report finally highlights the importance of our decisions.]

A major part of sustainable resource utilization is water reuse for both potable and non-potable purposes. For instance, Zuniga-Teran says households can collect greywater—excess runoff water from showers or washing machines—and harvest rainwater to use for car washing or toilet flushing. Cities could also reuse reclaimed water, or treated municipal wastewater, and send it to a drinking water treatment plant to be directed into the drinking water distribution system. Meanwhile, stormwater, or surface water from heavy rain or snow, may be used to irrigate landscapes and replenish local aquifers while reducing flooding, she adds. All these alternative water sources could be treated and used for a variety of purposes.

“Instead of building another dam or promoting water technologies, policies should seek to alter privileged lifestyles, limit water use for amenities, and redistribute income and water resources more equally,” says Savelli. “The construction of additional infrastructure would not address the root cause of water overconsumption, and in turn, this and other technocratic solutions would protract current water crises into the future.”

When it comes to sustainable urban water management, cities should prioritize low-income, marginalized communities that still experience legacies of redlining and disinvestment and are likely to suffer the impacts of climate change the most, says Zuniga-Teran. Therefore, funding engagement efforts is critical as well. “Equity has to be at the forefront of all water-related efforts,” she adds. “To address inequities, community engagement is needed to make sure all voices are heard and that programs and policies are designed to address their particular needs.”

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Although Tesla’s latest Impact Report promises that “a sustainable future is within reach,” the company’s 2022 figures show just how crucial accurate measurements are in achieving the lofty goal. Released earlier this week, an expanded dataset dramatically upped the electric vehicle maker’s total carbon footprint when compared with the prior year’s available information. The larger picture? An estimated 30.7 million tons of CO2 in supply chain emissions atop previously reported categories of pollution. That’s roughly equivalent to Serbia’s total emissions in 2021. 

[Related: Tesla employees allegedly viewed drivers’ car camera footage.]

Tesla only publicly offered how much greenhouse gas the company generated in 2021 via direct operations and EV owners charging their cars—around 2.5 million metric tons of CO2. That might seem small compared to its competitors (Ford recorded 337 million metric tons of CO2 in 2022, for example), but these segments of overall emissions are just a fraction of a company’s supply chain pollution stemming from production, transportation, and indirect operations. And while those numbers weren’t disclosed for 2021, they were for last year within Tesla’s new report.

As The Verge notes, the vast difference in numbers comes down to what companies generally choose to include in these kinds of industry reports. Carbon footprints are often broken down into three “scopes,” with Scope 1 encompassing direct company emissions (i.e. factory emissions, brick-and-mortar offices, and its own vehicles for travel and commuting). Meanwhile, Scope 2 includes emissions stemming from heating, A/C, and electricity usage in company buildings like offices. Scope 3 focuses on all the extra, indirect emissions from supply chain manufacturing alongside products’ lifecycle emissions.

Most often, businesses choose to detail only Scopes 1 and 2, as they are usually smaller than Scope 3’s numbers, even when combined. This often makes a company’s carbon footprint appear much smaller than it actually is when seen as a fuller picture; a strategy often referred to as “greenwashing.” In Tesla’s 2022 Impact Report, for instance, the first two “scopes” totaled just 610,000 metric tons of CO2—a much more palatable figure for investors and consumers than the true total of over 31 million tons.

[Related: Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims.]

Still, Tesla actually making its Scope 3 data available to the public offers some much needed additional transparency within the industry. Even then, however, the company’s  combined Scope 1 and 2 numbers rose a little under four percent, year-over-year. This, as The Verge also added, came even as Tesla still worked to make its EVs less carbon-intensive. Earlier this month, Tesla revealed “Part 3” of its ongoing “Master Plan” to provide sustainable energy for the entire world, estimating it will take $10 trillion in investments to fully realize.

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The oceans are inundated with plastic. Despite the numerous flashy proposed solutions, there unfortunately still isn’t any surefire way to clean it all up. One of the most buzzed about ideas—underwater vacuuming—has recently come up against intense scrutiny for its potential collateral damage to marine ecosystems and wildlife. Meanwhile, even the more delicate alternatives often hinge upon large, cumbersome surface skimmers. To tackle some of these issues, scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have created a robotic trash collector inspired by some of the oceans’ oldest and most resilient residents—jellyfish.

Recently detailed in the research journal Scientific Advances, the team’s “Jellyfish-Bot” already shows promise in helping cleanup the copious amounts of human-generated trash littering the planets’ aquatic environments. But unlike many other underwater cleaners, the prototype is incredibly small, energy-efficient, and nearly noiseless. Additionally, the hand-sized device doesn’t need to actually physically interact with its cleanup targets. Instead, the robot takes a cue from jellyfishes’ graceful movements via six limbs employing artificial muscles called hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic actuators, or HASELs.

As New Atlas explains, HASELs are ostensibly electrode-covered sacs filled with oils. When the electrodes receive a small current—in this case, about 100 mW—they become positively charged, then safely discharge the current into the negatively charged water around them. Alternating this current forces the oil in the sacs to move back and forth, thus making the actuators flap in a way that generates momentum to move trash particles upward. From there, humans or other gathering tools can scoop up the detritus.

“When a jellyfish swims upwards, it can trap objects along its path as it creates currents around its body,” study author and postdoc in the MPI-IS Physical Intelligence Department Tianlu Wang explained in a statement. “In this way, it can also collect nutrients.”

Wang went on to describe how their robot similarly circulates water around it. “This function is useful in collecting objects such as waste particles,” Wang adds. “It can then transport the litter to the surface, where it can later be recycled.”

[Related: Ocean plastic ‘vacuums’ are sucking up marine life along with trash.]

Apart from generating currents, the Jellyfish-Bots’ actuators could also be divided up into separate responsibilities. In the team’s demonstrations, the prototypes could use all six of its limbs for propulsion, or rely on two of them as claws to lightly grasp targets like an N95 face mask.

The biggest drawback at the moment is simply the fact that a controlled Jellyfish-Bot still requires a wired connection for power, thus hampering its scope. Although researchers have been able to incorporate battery and wireless communications modules into the robots, the untethered versions cannot currently be directed in a desired path. Still, it’s easy to envision future iterations of the Jellyfish-Bot clearing this relatively small hurdle. If that is accomplished, then fleets of the cute cleanup machines may soon be deployed as a safe, efficient, and environmentally harmless way to help tackle one of the environment’s most pressing threats.

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Throwing out trash can be an icky, and sometimes even confusing, experience. To better understand how humans interact with robots, Cornell University researchers recently created and released two trash and recycling bots to do some dirty work in a Manhattan plaza. And for most of the people who interacted with the adorable barrel bots, the robots’ helpful interceptions of waste were welcomed.

The study involved two robots. One was blue, and one was gray, and they were mounted on recycled hoverboard parts and equipped with 360-degree cameras. The bots received all sorts of reactions, from onlookers expressing their appreciation to treating it like a playful dog with a treat. Some of them even felt compelled to “feed” the robots, according to a Cornell press release. 

The scientists behind the creation recently presented their study, called “Trash Barrel Robots in the City,” in the video program at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. This isn’t the first time the trashbots have made their debut in the real world—the robot was deployed at Stanford a few years ago and was met by bystanders who quickly began to dote on the trashbot. According to The Verge in 2016, people became so smitten with the bot that “when it falls over they race to pick it up, even asking if it’s OK.” 

[Related: Meet Garmi, a robot nurse and companion for Germany’s elderly population.]

Team leader Wendy Ju, an associate professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, originally planned to turn chairs and tables in New York City into bots, but the trash can inevitably won out. “When we shared with them the trash barrel videos that we had done at Stanford, all discussions of the chairs and tables were suddenly off the table,” Ju said in a statement. “It’s New York! Trash is a huge problem!”

Of course, you can’t win over everybody, even if you’re a cute trash can. Some folks found it creepy, raised concerns about surveillance, gave it the middle finger, or even knocked it over. Now, the team hopes to send the trash can out to explore the rest of New York City, hopefully to be met with adoration and not animosity.

“Everyone is sure that their neighborhood behaves very differently,” Ju said. “So, the next thing that we’re hoping to do is a five boroughs trash barrel robot study.”

Watch more about these trash cans on wheels, below:

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Scientists have found dozens of species of coastal invertebrates organisms thriving Oscar the Grouch style in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Roughly 620,000 square miles long, or twice the size of Texas, the floating garbage heap is located between Hawaii and California. Five large spinning circular currents constantly pull trash towards the center of the patch, and it is considered the largest accumulation of ocean plastic on Earth.

These creatures found thriving in trash like crabs and anemones are normally found along the coasts, but the study published April 17 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution says that dozens of species have been able to survive and reproduce on the plastic garbage.  

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit.]

“This discovery suggests that past biogeographical boundaries among marine ecosystems—established for millions of years—are rapidly changing due to floating plastic pollution  accumulating in the subtropical gyres,” co-author and marine ecologist Linsey Haram said in a statement. Haram conducted this research while working at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

The team only recently discovered these “neopelagic communities,” or floating communities of organisms living in deep ocean waters. Organic matter in the ocean decomposes within a few years at most. But plastic debris lasts significantly longer, thus giving the animals a place to live and procreate.  

The team analyzed 105 plastic samples that were collected by The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization that is working on scalable solutions to get rid of ocean plastic, during their 2018 and 2019 expeditions. The samples were found in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a large zone that makes up most of that northern Pacific Ocean and is the largest ecosystem on Earth. Incredibly, 80 percent of the plastic trash that the team looked at showed signs of being colonized by coastal species. Some of the coastal species were even reproducing in their plastic homes, such as the Japanese anemone.

“We were extremely surprised to find 37 different invertebrate species that normally live in coastal waters, over triple the number of species we found that live in open waters, not only surviving on the plastic but also reproducing,” said Haram. “We were also impressed by how easily coastal species colonized new floating items, including our own instruments—an observation we’re looking into further.”

[Related: Ocean plastic ‘vacuums’ are sucking up marine life along with trash.]

While biologists already knew that coastal species can travel towards the open ocean on floating debris or on ships, it was long believed that these species couldn’t thrive or establish new communities at sea. Differences in temperature, water salinity, and the available nutrients between these two environments seemed too vast, but human-caused changes to the ocean ecosystems have forced marine biologists to rethink these ideas. 

“Debris that breaks off from this [garbage] patch constitutes the majority of debris arriving on Hawaiian beaches and reefs. In the past, the fragile marine ecosystems of the islands were protected by the very long distances from coastal communities of Asia and North America,” co-author and UH Mānoa oceanographer Nikolai Maximenko said in a statement. “The presence of coastal species persisting in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre near Hawai‘i is a game changer that indicates that the islands are at an increased risk of colonization by invasive species.”

According to data from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world produces roughly 460 million tons of plastic annually and this figure could triple by 2060 if government action is not taken soon. Some individual actions to reduce plastic use is shopping more sustainably, limiting use of single-use plastic like water bottles and plastic utensils, and participating in beach and river clean-ups.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Microplastics wreak havoc on fish in myriad ways, disrupting everything from eating behavior to brain development. While it’s clear these pesky particles can cause animals a world of trouble, scientists have found it much harder to pin down exactly how they cause so many problems.

“We know that if you expose animals to plastics, then oftentimes we’ll see pathology,” says Andrew Wargo, a disease ecologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). “But what we don’t really know are the secondary effects.”

That, however, is starting to change.

In controlled laboratory experiments, Wargo and his VIMS colleagues have shown how microplastics leave rainbow trout more vulnerable to a common salmonid disease, infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV). The effect can be dramatic: by exposing trout to a high concentration of either polystyrene beads or nylon microfibers for one month and then subjecting them to IHNV, the scientists found that fish were three to six times more likely to die, respectively, than IHNV-infected fish that hadn’t been exposed to plastics.

As well as increasing the lethality of IHNV, the microplastics also caused the exposed fish to have higher viral loads and shed more virus.

Taking tissue samples from the fish at different points in the experiment, the scientists found that the plastics were damaging the fish’s gills and provoking an inflammatory response. This likely makes it easier for the virus to invade the fish’s body, leading to more severe disease.

“There’s this kind of priming happening with some plastics,” says Meredith Evans Seeley, an environmental chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the study’s lead author. “That allows the pathogens to be more successful at colonizing the host.”

“Understanding the mechanism of how microplastics can increase the virulence of a virus? That’s pretty new,” says Bettie Cormier, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the work.

The deadly synergy between microplastics and viruses could be especially troubling in aquaculture operations, Wargo says. Infections spread easily on fish farms, and farmed fish frequently encounter plastics such as nylon and polystyrene, which are used for buoys and nets.

Wild fish encounter microplastics and viruses, too, Cormier adds, so similar interactions between microplastics and pathogens could be having ecosystem-level effects.

“Plastics and pathogens are everywhere,” Wargo says. “I think if we want to understand the effects of both, we probably need to consider them together.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Standing at the foot of a rocky sandstone cliff, biologist Michelle Wainstein inspected her essentials: latex gloves, two long cotton swabs, glass vials, and tubes filled with buffer solution. She placed them in a blue dry bag, rolled it up, and clipped it to a rope wrapped around her waist. It was late afternoon, and she was slick with dirt and sweat from navigating the dense terrain. Her destination lay across the frigid river: two small logs of otter fecal matter resting on a mossy boulder. In she plunged.

The river, the Green-Duwamish in Washington State, trickles out of the Cascade Range and empties 150 kilometers downstream into Puget Sound. The last eight kilometers of the run—known as the lower Duwamish—is so polluted the US Environmental Protection Agency designated it a Superfund site in 2001. For a century, Seattle’s aviation and manufacturing industries routinely dumped waste chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into the water.

“A lot of the river is still really polluted,” says Jamie Hearn, the Superfund program manager at Duwamish River Community Coalition. “The mud is thick and black, and you can smell it.”

Despite the pollution, river otters are everywhere along the waterway, even in the most contaminated areas near the river’s mouth. “I would be walking the docks looking for scat,” remembers Wainstein, “and a couple of times we were lucky enough to see moms with their pups.”

For several weeks in the summer of 2016 and 2017, Wainstein surveyed otter poop she collected from a dozen sites along the river. Comparing contaminant concentrations in the otters’ poop between the river’s industrial and rural zones, Wainstein uncovered the lingering legacy of the region’s toxic past. The poop from otters in the lower Duwamish contained nearly 26 times more PCBs and 10 times more PAHs than poop from their cousins in cleaner water upstream. PCBs disrupt hormonal and neurological processes and affect reproduction in mammals. Both PCBs and PAHs are human carcinogens.

The discovery that otters along the lower Duwamish are living with such high levels of contamination upends a common narrative: that river otters’ return to a once-degraded landscape is a sign that nature is healing.

In Singapore, where smooth-coated otters have reappeared in canals and reservoirs, they have been embraced as new national mascots. “It plays into that rhetoric that government agencies want to project,” says environmental historian Ruizhi Choo, “that we’ve done such a good job that nature is coming back. That image of a city in nature is the new marketing branding.”

In Europe, the once-common Eurasian otter similarly began reappearing in the late 20th century following successful river cleanup campaigns. Conservationist Joe Gaydos at the SeaDoc Society thinks that this phenomenon has helped form the mental link between otters and ecosystem health.

“The number of animals is our first indicator,” Gaydos says. But few seem to ask the next question: are those animals healthy?

As Wainstein’s study suggests, perhaps not. The otters she analyzed in the lower Duwamish have some of the highest concentrations of PCBs and PAHs ever recorded in wild river otters. Previous research has found a correlation between PCB exposure and health risks in wild river otters, including increased bone pathologies, reproductive and immunological disorders, organ abnormalities, and hormonal changes.

Even so, the contamination is not manifesting in physically obvious ways. “They’re not washing up on shore with tumors all over their bodies,” Wainstein says, and neither is their population dwindling. “They’re not setting off this direct alarm with a big change in their ability to survive.”

The otters’ ability to bear such a heavy contaminant burden suggests that a population resurgence alone may not reflect the quality of an environment. They just become as toxic as the environments they inhabit.

However, their localized bathroom habits, mixed diet of fish, crustaceans, and mammals, and persistence in the face of pollution make them useful indicators of environmental contamination.

River otters have played this role before. Following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, river otters lingered in oil-drenched waterways, allowing scientists like Larry Duffy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to track the effectiveness of the oil cleanup. In 2014, scientists in Illinois discovered dieldrin in otter organ tissue even though the insecticide had already largely been banned for 30 years. In these cases, the collection of long-term pollution data was made possible by the creatures’ resilience in contaminated waterways. Wainstein wants to similarly use the Green-Duwamish River otters as biomonitors of the Superfund cleanup over the next decade.

Watching workers dismantle a portion of the river’s levied banks to make channels for salmon, Wainstein thinks about the seabirds, shorebirds, and small mammals, like beaver and mink, that were driven out by industrial contamination. She wonders if one day the rumbling machinery dredging up clawfuls of sediment from the riverbed will be taken over by the piercing cries of marbled murrelets, the croaks of tufted puffins, and the bubbling twittering of western snowy plovers.

“How long will it take? And will it actually work?” she says of the cleanup effort. The otters might hold the answer.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Bottled water is one of the most popular beverages in the world. In the United States, bottled water has outsold carbonated soft drinks every year since 2016. Currently, the global bottled water market is worth $270 billion, and it’s projected to exceed $500 billion by the end of the decade. Only three countries combined make up almost half of the global market: the USA, China, and Indonesia.

Despite its widespread consumption, bottled water might actually slow the progress of providing universal access to safe drinking water, according to a recent report from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH).

Bottled water can foster distrust of and distract attention from clean tap water

The report argues that the rapidly-growing bottled water industry may have an adverse impact on the investments in long-term public water supply infrastructure development and improvement. The expansion of the bottled water market may distract governmental efforts to provide safe drinking water for all, says Zeineb Bouhlel, study author and research and communication associate at the UNU-INWEH.

“In certain countries such as Mexico and Indonesia, the industry is somehow reducing the role of the state in providing safe water for the population,” says Bouhlel. “When bottled water is popular, the government may spend less effort and less financial resources to make the public water supply available for all and of better quality.”

According to the report, the drivers of the bottled water market aren’t the same around the world. In the Global North, people drink bottled water because they don’t trust tap water and believe the former is healthier. However, individuals in the Global South are primarily motivated by the lack or absence of a reliable public water supply.

[Related: Sorting and recycling plastic is notoriously hard—but this AI could help.]

“In many places, bottled water is an important source of safe drinking water absent adequate public water supply systems,” says Sara Hughes, water policy expert and associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “But the bottled water industry actively encourages distrust of tap water, which does erode public support and investment in public drinking water systems even where the water is available and safe to drink.”

The idea that bottled water is unquestionably safer than tap water must be challenged. The quality of bottled water can be compromised by the origin of the water or the industrial processes it goes through, the report says. For example, commercially-bottled water labeled “mineral water” or “spring water” isn’t guaranteed to be free of Cryptosporidium (Crypto) parasites, the second highest cause of reported waterborne disease outbreaks in 2015.

Globally, tap water is much more regulated and monitored than bottled water, with the latter having less sampling and no obligation to disclose information on the content or the process for some types and in certain countries, says Bouhlel.

The growing bottled water industry may distract attention and resources from the development of public water supply systems, when, in reality, less than half of what the world pays for bottled water every year is enough to ensure clean tap water access for millions of people without it for years to come.

The bottled water industry’s impact on the environment

The bottled water industry may have negative effects on the environment through the whole supply chain, from water extraction to packaging disposal, says Bouhlel. For instance, it contributes to the pressure on water resources and may increase water scarcity at a local level, he adds.

“Bottled water can place additional burden on aquifers, rivers, and streams, unless withdrawals are properly accounted for,” says Hughes. “In most parts of the U.S., and globally, we lack tools to accurately track and measure how an additional withdrawal—such as for bottled water—affects aquatic ecosystems, and the ability to regulate withdrawals from shared aquifers in particular.”

The production of plastics and the logistics of delivering the product to the consumer also come at the price of greenhouse gas emissions, says Bouhlel. The manufacturing of bottled water is very fossil-fuel intensive. A 2009 Environmental Research Letters study estimated the energy footprint of the various phases of bottled water production and found that it requires about 5.6 and 10.2 million joules of energy per liter, about 2000 times the energy cost of producing tap water.

[Related: Groundwater is an incredible resource. It’s time to treat it like one.]

“Environmental impacts may also be seen at the stage of disposal, where more than 80 percent of bottled water is packaged in plastic and PET containers, and where the recycling rate so far is very low at a global level,” he adds. Plastic bottles often end up in landfills and bodies of water, harming natural ecosystems and biodiversity.

Improving access to drinking water supply in the US

The United States has one of the safest public water supplies in the world. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for ensuring that public water systems meet the standards for drinking water quality. “[T]he majority of Americans do not need to purchase more expensive and environmentally harmful bottled water to meet their needs,” says Hughes. “That said, there are communities in the U.S. that do lack safe and reliable drinking water and that is completely unacceptable.”

A 2021 Nature Communications study reported that over a thousand community water systems are considered “serious violators” of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Moreover, about 48 percent of households on Indian reservations don’t have access to clean water. Residents of Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan have all been affected by a major water supply crisis in recent years as well.

According to Hughes, there are three significant drinking water supply challenges in the US, and they can all be addressed with federal investment: ensuring the old drinking water systems are maintained and kept in compliance, providing safe drinking water access in Tribal communities, and addressing drinking water quality and access problems facing rural communities.

“Communities need resources to upgrade and repair aging systems and replace lead service lines, and increasing water rates to cover these costs will not be feasible in all places,” says Hughes. “Tribal communities are in need of significant and long-overdue infrastructure investment.”

Rural communities, which face challenges related to declining water supplies and contaminated water sources, might require a mix of funding and regulatory solutions. This can include restricting agricultural runoff, exploring regionalization opportunities for rural water systems, and investing in technical capacities in these systems and their personnel, says Hughes.

In 2018, the EPA published its Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment and reported that the country needs about $472.6 billion to maintain and improve drinking water infrastructure over the next 20 years. It would be used to replace or improve deteriorating pipelines, expand infrastructure to reduce water contamination, and construct water storage reservoirs.

“Some of the most important policy changes could have more to do with how drinking water systems are funded and organized,” says Hughes, “rather than only ramping up regulatory requirements.”

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This article was originally published on Undark.

To jumpstart a paltry market for recycled plastic, governments across the globe are pushing companies to include recycled materials in their products. Last year, the United Kingdom introduced a tax on manufacturers that produce or import plastic packaging containing less than 30 percent recycled plastic. In 2024, New Jersey will begin enforcing similar rules, albeit with lower targets. California now requires that beverage containers be made of 15 percent recycled materials, and Washington will enact a similar requirement later this year. The European Commission, Canada, and Mexico are all considering comparable moves.

Currently, most plastic products are derived from freshly extracted fossil fuels, including crude oil and natural gas. Incorporating some recycled plastic could reduce emissions, and shrink pollution in waterways and landfills, experts say. But collecting, sorting, pulverizing, and melting post-consumer plastics for reuse is expensive. The new laws will potentially help recyclers find buyers for what would otherwise become waste.

But regulators may need a better way to verify that the new laws are working. While companies can enlist a third-party to certify their use of recycled content, most certifiers take a bird’s-eye view, tracking the materials across a range of products and factories. As a result, an item with a “recycled content” label might be completely devoid of recycled content.

This current approach, called mass balance, poses additional challenges for those seeking to verify recycled content. To work well, mass balance requires trustworthy and accurate data, which are not always available across a convoluted supply chain. Experts warn mass balance may also lead to inflated estimates of recycled content.

Researchers in the U.K. have developed a novel method to measure this recycled content that adds fluorescent dyes to recycled plastics at the beginning of manufacturing. By measuring the change in color, the team can determine the amount of recycled content in each individual plastic product. Through the nonprofit ReCon², the team is running pilot tests in real-world conditions and says this approach can help prevent fraud, keep costs low, and improve consumer trust.

In 2019, the world generated roughly 350 million tons of plastic, a doubling of production over the past two decades. Just 6 percent of global plastics produced came from recycled plastics, leaving most to be shoveled into landfills, incinerated, or carried into ecosystems. Recycling is not sufficient for solving the problem of plastic pollution, many researchers suggest. Instead, the issue will require some measure of reduction and re-use as well. Nevertheless, scientists say that these new laws and technologies that focus on this last option could mitigate the environmental harms of plastic production.

It’s “imperative” to be able to track materials through this recycling market in a way that makes sense, said Katrina Knauer, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “If we really want to make the circular economy a reality, efficient tracking and quantifiable tracking is going to be the only way we can really do that and create trust in a system.”

Companies like Unilever, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo have been making claims about using recycled content in their products for years. But the term “recycled content” is as flexible as the term “organic” before regulators clamped down on its use, said Knauer. Earning that badge now requires ticking several boxes determined by federal agencies in the U.S. and the European Commission in the EU. Recycled content hasn’t received the same kind of regulatory scrutiny.

As the recycling industry develops, “I think we will run into some of the same challenges that we ran into in the past with companies making claims that may not be very true,” said Knauer, who is also the chief technology officer at the Bio-Optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment, an organization at the Department of Energy that helps companies adopt greener plastics technologies.

Right now, many companies use mass balance, which considers all of the inputs that go into making a product and then balances them with the outputs to calculate the amount of recycled material.

For example, say there are 20 plastic bottles in a recycling bin. Those enter a mass balance when they are handed over to a recycling company. A manufacturer may then buy these bottles from the recycling company, as well as the equivalent of 80 bottles from newly extracted oil or gas. Assuming the manufacturer then produces 100 total bottles, the mass balance will conclude that each bottle is made with 20 percent recycled content.

But there’s a twist: Under some certification schemes, the company can attribute its recycled material evenly across several plants, including those that haven’t been able to acquire any recycled material. As a result, you usually cannot calculate a single product’s recycled content, if it has any at all.

For Zero Waste Europe, a network of European communities and experts pushing companies and governments to reduce waste, this makes the mass balance approach “a simplistic and meaningless bookkeeping exercise.” But the problem goes beyond misleading marketing. Recycled material can be lower quality, and too much in a product may threaten the product’s integrity.

There are some benefits to mass balance’s flexible approach. With the supply of recycled plastics limited in some areas, it’s helpful to allow companies to compensate by using extra recycled content in areas with plenty to buy.

Eventually, however, consumers should be able to expect that the bottle in their hands has a specific level of recycled content. “That’s the ultimate goal, but it is a really complex system, and it takes a long time to make changes, so we’ll probably need to rely on mass balance to meet that kind of transition,” said Alix Grabowski, director of plastic and material science at the World Wildlife Fund.

That system complexity is felt in other ways, too. Tracking recycled materials along sometimes tortuous chains of purchases depends on trust between companies, said Wan-Ting Hsu, a material flow research analyst and Ph.D. candidate at University College London. Post-consumer plastic material can pass between many companies and jurisdictions with different rules about responsibility and accounting before it returns to retailers ready to sell it back to consumers.

In interviews with key stakeholders in the plastics value chain, such as brand owners and recyclers, Hsu has learned that companies struggle to verify the source of material, and often they are left to ask for data from previous owners, which can sometimes be inaccurate. Without better proof of content, companies could make misleading claims, experts say, though they could not point to public evidence of such cases.

Another issue: The methods to certify recycled content vary across certification bodies, and there is little consistency. When the Canadian government commissioned the environmental consultancy company Eunomia to consult with manufacturers, as evidenced in the 2021 report, the manufacturers said they often chose certification schemes that offered the most flexible approach. Under such schemes, the company with 20 recycled bottles in its mix of 100, for example, could claim 20 of its bottles are 100 percent recycled, even when this is not the case.

“At this point we haven’t had any real legislation for this,” said Sarah Edwards, North America CEO at Eunomia. Up until now, she added, companies have used certification more for marketing or as part of longer-term sustainability goals.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery told Undark that it requires beverage manufacturers to report data to them directly and does not use third-party certifiers at this time. It would not disclose the method to certify information reported. In a draft rule in Washington state that will be finalized later this year, the Department of Ecology said it will require that producers attest to the accuracy of their data or obtain third-party certification.

Mass balance is especially contentious when it is used to certify products created from chemical recycling, a collection of mostly new techniques to strip plastics down to their basic building blocks, called monomers. In contrast to mechanical recycling, which shreds plastic but keeps its chemical form, manufacturers can use monomers to construct many different kinds of plastics, which are made up of polymers.

As part of the chemical recycling process, a plant may burn a portion of the recycled material into fuel or other byproducts. Though this process releases greenhouse gases, some mass balance certifications allow a company to count the burned plastic towards its output of “recycled content.” The hypothetical supply chain that takes in 20 recycled bottles may still claim to produce bottles with 20 percent recycled content, even if 5 of those recycled bottles have been burnt as fuel.

In its 2021 report, Eunomia wrote that the chemical sector preferred to work with ISCC Plus, a third-party certifier in Germany that allows this kind of tabulation. In Edwards’ eyes, the chemical recycling industry is pushing for this as a temporary tool to get started.

There’s an additional point of contention: With some processes of reducing polymers down to monomers, molecules can react with ambient elements like nitrogen and hydrogen, inflating their weight with molecules that aren’t plastic. Calculating a mass balance just on weight — the typical approach for mechanical recycling — doesn’t work as well for chemical recycling and can overestimate the recycled content in materials.

A widely cited white paper published by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity committed to creating a circular economy, provided an example: Producing 100 pounds of polyamide, often used in textiles, would require 150 pounds of recycled material if measured with weight, or 170 pounds if measured with calorific value — a unit that quantifies an object’s energy and doesn’t change as readily.

Scientists and engineers have agreed to use more precise units, like calorific value, but “there is quite a bit of argument across the industry” about which units to use, Knauer said.

Michael Shaver, a professor of polymer science at the University of Manchester and one of the researchers involved with ReCon², said the group had “significant concerns in terms of the mass balance approach.”

“If the public believes that this is a measure of exactly how much plastic is in each package, that’s not what mass balance actually gives you, right?” he said.

Shaver wanted to develop a way to measure the recycled content in each individual product. He joined with Ph.D. student Zoé Schyns and research fellow Thomas Bennett, and together they developed a technique that adds fluorescent dye to the recycled materials during the manufacturing process. Regardless of what happens between the beginning and end of manufacturing, the ratio between fluorescence at the beginning and end reveals the concentration of recycled content in each individual product. Some of the light appears as green within the visible light spectrum, but one strategy is to keep the precise technique a secret so companies do not misuse it.

“We can show not only that everyone in your supply chain acted appropriately, but also that you have the same in all of your different bottles or film,” said Shaver. Although the public results focus on three of the most popular plastic types, the researchers say the approach can be adapted for other kinds of plastics and rules. Sponsors of a year-long trial phase include Kraft-Heinz and Reckitt, two large consumer good corporations, and the U.K.’s leading recycling label, OPRL.

The company believes roll out of the technology would require an industry-wide approach, even as others doubt that plastic producers can adapt to including tracers. Shaver expects that their nonprofit ReCon² will “shepherd” firms into the program, while it audits participating companies and gatekeeps against products with inaccurate or false recycled content claims. As a nonprofit, it would prioritize keeping the technique as low- cost as possible to promote adoption and minimize fraud through passive compliance.

On a broader scale, Knauer expects that establishing trust in measuring recycled content will take action from governments, as happened with “organic” labels. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may be moving in this direction. In 2021, the agency laid out a national recycling strategy that includes the creation of “recycled content measures.” (A spokesperson told Undark that the EPA hasn’t started working on this yet.)

“I do not think that mass balance is the way we’re going to do it forever,” said Knauer. “I think there’s a lot to be done in this space and a lot more innovation we can certainly do.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Artificial light at night can wreak havoc on a number of animals, from confusing moonlight-following sea turtle hatchlings to disrupting the sleep patterns of free-living animals like birds, to even stressing out caterpillars and making them age quicker.

Scientists are continuing to look more at the effects of artificial night light on insect larvae–like caterpillars.  A study published this month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences found that even moderate levels of artificial light attract more caterpillar predators and reduce the chance that their larvae grow up into moths. Moths are part of the order lepidoptera that also contains butterflies and skippers ,and their larvae can serve as food for larger prey like birds, wasps, and some small amphibians. 

[Related: The switch to LEDs in Europe is visible from space.]

To test this light theory, scientists from Cornell University placed 552 lifelike caterpillar replicas made of soft clay in a forest in New Hampshire, gluing them to leaves to look as real as possible. They were made from a green clay that mimics the color and size of two moth caterpillars: Noctuidae (owlet moths) and Notodontidae (prominent moths). The marks of predators like birds, other insects, and arthropods can be left in the soft clay if they tried to take a bite of the fake caterpillars. 

Some of the models were placed on experimental lots that had 10 to 15 lux LED lighting, or roughly the brightness of a streetlight. The lights stayed on at night for about seven weeks in June and July 2021.

Of the 552 caterpillars deployed, 521 models were recovered. Almost half (249 fake caterpillars) showed predatory marks from arthropods, during the summer-long nighttime study. Additionally, they found that the rate of caterpillar predation was 27 percent higher on the experimental plots compared with the control areas that didn’t have the LED lighting.

Since the night sky is getting increasingly more polluted with artificial light, this poses another ecological problem for lepidopterans. These creatures already suffer from  threats like  habitat loss, chemical pollutants used in farming, climate change, and increasingly prevalent invasive species, according to the team.

[Related: ‘Skyglow’ is rapidly diminishing our nightly views of the stars.]

These findings are particularly worrisome for caterpillars at a larval stage when they are eating leaves to ensure that they grow into their next stage of development. Study co-author and research ecologist Sara Kaiser told the Cornell Chronicle, “When you turn on a porch light, you suddenly see a bunch of insects outside the door. But when you draw in those arthropod predators by adding light, then what is the impact on developing larvae? Top-down pressure – the possibility of being eaten by something.”
Some simple ways to reduce artificial light are by using smart lighting control to remotely manage any outside lighting, making sure that lights are close to the ground and shielded, and using the lowest intensity lighting possible.

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A class of compounds known as PFAS, or so-called forever chemicals, have made the headlines many times in the past few years—they are difficult to remove or break down, leading to pervasiveness in nature and toxic health implications for our own bodies. In fact, last year the EPA found that the chemicals cause harm at even extremely low levels, noting that any exposure could be unsafe.

And while the European Union and other governments have made steps to reduce their presence, the US has been slower to regulate them until quite recently. 

On Tuesday, the Biden administration debuted a new action to protect communities against this pollution, notably by making the nation’s first drinking water standard for PFAS, technically known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This proposal would be one of the first new standards to update the Safe Drinking Water Act since 1996, and is even more ambitious than EPA suggested limits proposed in 2016. 

[Related: PFAS are toxic and they’re everywhere. Here’s how to stay away from them.]

“I am thrilled to announce that EPA is taking yet another bold step to protect public health,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Folks, this is a tremendous step forward in the right direction. We anticipate that when fully implemented, this rule will prevent thousands of deaths and reduce tens of thousands of serious PFAS related illnesses.”

The proposal goes after six chemicals—specifically targeting PFOA and PFOS at 4 parts per trillion. Additionally, there would be limits set on the total mixed amount of four other similar chemicals, known as PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS, and GenX. If finalized, these regulations would require public water systems to monitor these compounds and notify the public if limits are exceeded. 

“Regulating these six highly toxic PFAS chemicals in drinking water is a historic start to protecting our families and communities,” Anna Reade, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, told the New York Times. “We cannot safeguard public health until we get off this toxic treadmill of regulating one PFAS at a time when thousands of other PFAS remain unregulated.”

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is on board. According to the New York Times, members of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies are concerned about high expense of compliance, estimating it would cost $43 million for just one utility in Cape Fear, North Carolina, to filter out PFAS. On the other hand, the American Chemistry Council noted to the Times that two of the chemicals mentioned in the new proposal had already been phased out of production by some manufacturers eight years ago. 

[Related: The right kind of filter can keep microplastics out of drinking water.]

A few experts also pointed out that cleaning up water is only so effective—to preserve human and environmental health, corporations must stop manufacturing these harmful chemicals altogether. While some companies have made promises to stop producing PFAS, they are hardly universal. “You have to turn it off at the source,” Carol Kwiatkowski of the Green Science Policy Institute, an environmental advocacy organization, told the BBC. “It doesn’t make any sense to keep cleaning them out of the water if we keep putting them back in.”

The Biden administration has been laying the groundwork for such a move for over a year. In 2021, Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed, which included $10 billion of funding to address emerging contaminants including PFAS. As of February 2023, $2 billion of that will go towards addressing pollutants in drinking water across the country.

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Air pollution is messing with the love lives of fruit flies, warns a new study published on March 14 in the journal Nature Communications. Male common fruit flies had trouble in recognizing their female counterparts after breathing in toxic gas, causing them to make a move on another male. 

Though there’s been some research hinting at bisexuality among fruit flies, the current results suggest it has to do more with ozone pollution. Even brief exposure to O₃ was enough to alter the chemical makeup of pheromones, a unique trails insects use to detect and attract mates. Increasing levels of air pollutants from cars, power plants, and industrial boilers around the world could stop common fruit flies from reproducing, causing a dramatic decline in the insect species.

[Related: Almost everyone in the world breathes unhealthy air]

The chemical ecologists placed 50 male flies into a tube and exposed them to 100 parts per billion (ppb) of ozone—global ozone levels range from 12 ppb to 67 ppb—for two hours. After two hours, fruit flies showed reduced amounts of a pheromone called cis-Vaccenyl Acetate (cVA) in compounds involved in reproductive behavior.

A closer look revealed that ozone seems to have changed the chemical structure of pheromones. Most insect pheromones have carbon double bonds, explains Markus Knaden, a group leader for insect behavior at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology in Germany and study author. Whenever a compound has carbon double bonds, it becomes highly sensitive to oxidization by ozone or nitric oxide and starts to separate. The explanation is in line with their findings of high amounts of the liquid heptanal in the flies, a product that emerges after cVA breaks down. 

Did the altered pheromones affect a male’s chances at finding a partner? It appears so. A separate experiment exposed male flies to 30 minutes of either ozone ranging from 50 to 200 ppb or regular air with a much lower amount ozone before being placed them with female fruit flies. While males from both groups wasted no time in trying to court females, ozone-exposed fruit flies had more trouble getting a mate. 

“The male advertises himself with pheromones. The more he produces, the more attractive he becomes to the female,” says Knaden. Losing the chemical aphrodisiac made ozone-exposed males a less desirable option to females, who took nearly twice as much time choosing from the corrupted bachelors than the clean ones.

Not only is ozone pollution hampering the males’ ability to get female attention, it’s also affecting how they identify other individuals. Knaden says his team expected the altered pheromones to affect the ability for male fruit flies to distinguish between a male and a female, but what they didn’t expect were males to jump on each other. “In the beginning, it was a very funny observation to see really long chains where one male was courting the next and then the next down the line,” he describes. With the altered pheromones, “the male basically jumps on everything that is small and moves a little bit like a fly, regardless of what it is.”

“Very little is known about how air pollution interferes with insect sex pheromone signaling, so it is great to see this work underway,” says James Ryalls, a research fellow in the Center for Agri-environmental Research at the University of Reading in England, who was not affiliated with the research. “The study demonstrates how disruptive air pollution can be to insect communication, with potential ecological ramifications such as reduced biodiversity.”

[Related: Flies evolved before dinosaurs—and survived an apocalyptic world]

Getting rid of the buggers that crowd your bananas and melons might seem like a good idea at first glance. However, Ryalls warns that these agricultural pests contribute greatly to the world’s ecosystem. As nature’s clean-up crew, fruit flies help decompose rotting fruit, releasing nutrients for plants, bacteria, and fungi to use. They also serve as food for other animals like birds and spiders. Lastly, they are a common insect model used in biomedical research and have contributed to countless neuroscience and genetic discoveries.

Fruit flies are not the only ones feeling the effects of air pollution. Knaden says he has seen dangerous ozone levels affecting flower volatile compounds, which are used as cues for pollinators. His 2020 study found moths were less attracted to flower odors from plants exposed to the gas, resulting in less pollination. 

“Insects are on the decline, and we thought it was from pesticides and habitat loss,” says Knaden. “It seems there are more screws we have to turn, one of them being air pollutants.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Camilla Rathsach walked along the lichen-covered sand, heading out from the lone village on Denmark’s remote Anholt island—a spot of land just a few kilometers wide in the middle of the Kattegat Strait, which separates the Danish mainland from Sweden. As Anholt Town’s 45 streetlights receded into the distance, moonlit shadows reached out to embrace the dunes. Rathsach looked up, admiring the Milky Way stretching across the sky. Thousands of stars shone down. “It’s just amazing,” she says. “Your senses heighten and you hear the water and feel the fresh air.”

This dark-sky moment was one of many Rathsach experienced while visiting the island in 2020 for work on her master’s thesis on balancing the need for outdoor lighting and darkness. Having grown up in urban areas, Rathsach wasn’t used to how bright moonlit nights could be. And after speaking with the island’s residents, who value the dark sky deeply and navigate with little outdoor light, she realized that artificial lighting could be turned down at night depending on the moon’s phase.

At Aalborg University in Denmark, she worked with her graduate supervisor, Mette Hvass, to present a new outdoor lighting design for Anholt’s church. Rathsach and Hvass picked the church for their project because it is a central meeting place for the community yet it currently has no outdoor lights. They thought lighting would make it easier for people to navigate but wanted to preserve the inviting ambiance of moonlight.

One of the guiding principles of designing sustainable lighting is to start with darkness, and add only the minimum amount of light required. Darkness and natural light sources are important to many species, and artificial light can be downright dangerous.

“Lights can attract and disorient seabirds during their flights between colony and foraging sites at sea,” says Elena Maggi, an ecologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who is not involved in the project. Anholt’s beaches host a variety of breeding seabirds, including gulls and terns, and the island is a stopover for many migrating birds. The waters around the island are also home to seals, cod, herring, and seagrass. Though scientists have made progress in understanding the effects of artificial light at night on a range of species, such as turtles, birds, and even corals, there is still more to learn.

“We still don’t know exactly how artificial light might interact with other disturbances like noise and chemical pollution, or with rising ocean temperatures and acidification due to climate change,” says Maggi.

The scientists’ final design for the church includes path lighting and small spotlights under the window arches, along with facade lighting under the eaves shining downward. To preserve the dark sky, path lighting would turn off on bright moonlit nights, and facade lighting would shut off on semi-bright or bright nights. The window lighting would stay on regardless of the moon’s phase.

The adaptive lighting cooked up by Camilla Rathsach and Mette Hvass would automatically adjust to the availability of moonlight, tweaking this church’s lighting automatically to balance visibility and darkness. Mock-ups show how the church would be lit under no moonlight (first) and a full moon (second). Illustrations courtesy of Camilla Rathsach

“The contrast between the moon’s cold white light reflecting off the church’s walls and the warm orange lights in the windows would create a cozy, inviting experience,” says Rathsach.

The moonlight adaptive lighting design project is part of a growing effort to balance the need for functional lighting in the town and to protect the darkness. Recently, the town’s public streetlights were swapped for dark-sky friendly lamps, says Anne Dixgaard, chairman of Dark Sky Anholt.

Dixgaard also organizes a yearly walk out to Anholt’s beach, where skywatchers can learn about the night sky. “People really value Anholt’s dark sky and want to preserve it,” she says.

Rathsach and Hvass are working on the moonlight adaptive design project in hopes that it will be implemented one day, but they still have some challenges to overcome. Moonlight is a relatively faint light source, so detecting it using sensors is challenging, and lights would need to adjust automatically on nights with intermittent cloud cover. Yet big initiatives often begin with small steps.

“This work is something new and unexpected,” says Maggi. “It’s a very interesting approach to mitigating the negative effects of artificial light at night.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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You may not realize it, but various everyday products like adhesives, food packaging, and cookware contain certain chemicals called per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to make them resistant to heat, oil, grease, or water. More than 9,000 PFAS have been identified so far, which are used in a wide range of industrial and commercial applications. 

Despite their important function in various consumer products, they have a serious downside. PFAS don’t break down easily in the environment due to their chemical structure that resists biodegradation. This explains why they’re often called “forever chemicals.”

“Their unique structure allows them to also move through surface and groundwaters and persist in soils and sediments,” says Allen Burton, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan whose research deals with environmental toxicology. “They bioaccumulate in humans and wildlife and are so common their ingestion cannot be easily avoided.”

PFAS can leach into soil, air, and water, and they’re already found in humans’ blood and urine. Studies also report that PFAS are ubiquitous in municipal wastewater—not only in those with direct sources like textile mills or papermaking operations, but also in non-industrial wastewater like septic tanks and office buildings. Some suspect it comes from the microfibers in water-resistant clothing during laundry or from human excrement. However, new research reveals another potential source: toilet paper.

[Related: Are bidets really better for the planet than toilet paper?]

Chemicals called disubstituted poly-fluoroalkyl phosphates (diPAPs) are one of the major PFAS found in biosolids, the solid waste generated from wastewater treatment plants. With this understanding, researchers decided to look into toilet paper, a product where diPAPs are commonly used. Their findings in a recent Environmental Science & Technology Letters study suggest that toilet paper may be a major source of PFAS in wastewater treatment systems. 

“It is important to identify sources of PFAS so decision-makers can make informed choices on how to limit their environmental release,” says Jake Thompson, study author and a graduate research assistant at the Sustainable Materials Management Research Group at the University of Florida.

Thompson and his co-authors extracted PFAS from sewage sludge from eight US wastewater treatment plants and toilet paper rolls sold in four world regions, namely North America, South and Central America, Africa, and Western Europe. The most abundant PFAS in both samples was diPAPs, specifically, 6:2 fluorotelomer phosphate diester (6:2 diPAP).

The diPAPs are what you’d call precursor species of PFAS, which means they can be transformed into terminal or more stable PFAS that are known to have impacts on human and environmental health, such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) or perfluorodecanoic acid (PFDA). For example, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies PFOA as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” 

“These transformed species are often more polar and bound to soils and sediment to a greater degree, making them more persistent,” says Burton, who was not involved in the study. “In addition, as these compounds build up in soils and sediments over time, they are more available for [uptake] by soil- and sediment-dwelling invertebrates, and thus pose a food chain contamination threat.”

Based on their findings and data about PFAS levels in sewage and per capita toilet paper use in other countries, the authors estimated that toilet paper can contribute about 35 percent of the 6:2 diPAP in wastewater sludge in Sweden, 89 percent in France, but only around four percent in US and Canada. The impact of toilet paper in Sweden and France is higher because they have much lower 6:2 diPAP concentrations in wastewater sludge compared to North America. 

Furthermore, North America uses more toilet paper than other countries, suggesting that 6:2 diPAPs in US wastewater systems mostly come from other sources, like cosmetics, textiles, and food packaging, which are also worth looking into. The authors hope that by understanding potential PFAS sources, policymakers become “better equipped to address the challenge of PFAS,” says Thompson.

[Related: PFAS are toxic and they’re everywhere. Here’s how to stay away from them.]

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its new plans to develop wastewater pollution limits and restrict PFAS discharges from industrial sources, which were announced earlier this year. However, the ability of wastewater treatment plants to remove PFAS needs to be addressed as well. Currently, available wastewater treatment technologies don’t destroy PFAS. Conventional treatments can’t effectively remove them and may only pass them through to lakes, streams, and groundwater.

Burton says it’s not surprising to find PFAS in toilet paper and sewage sludge, which is “yet another documented widespread source of PFAS contamination of the environment.” But reducing PFAS in wastewater is only one strategy to minimize total exposures in the environment and the risk to humans and biota, he adds.

“Like microplastic contamination, it is most effective and efficient to prevent wastewater contamination by controlling the sources,” he adds. “Undoubtedly, they are effective substitutes for PFAS in making toilet paper and other consumer products.”

Disposable food packaging and food ware commonly use PFAS as an oil and grease barrier, but uncoated paper products, products made from bamboo and palm leaves, and reusable cutlery sets are viable alternatives. PFAS are also used in textile finishing to repel grease, stain, and water, but manufacturers can use melamine-based compounds instead. Non-essential PFAS use, like in personal care products and cosmetics, can be phased out completely.

“If society fails to dramatically reduce these multiple [PFAS] exposures,” says Burton, “we increase the likelihood of our children and wildlife facing serious risks.”

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Air pollution, as it turns out, is incredibly difficult to avoid no matter where you are on the planet. A new study from Monash University in Australia found that nearly 99 percent of the world’s population are exposed to unhealthy levels of dangerous air pollutants called ambient fine particulate matter (PM 2.5). 

The study was published March 6 in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. The team of researchers used computer models to assess annual and daily PM2.5 concentrations around the world from 2000 to 2019.

[Related: Tiny air pollutants may come from different sources, but they all show a similar biased trend.]

The models used data from ground stations that monitor air quality, weather, and simulations of how chemicals travel through the air. They found that in 2019, only 0.001 percent of the global population was exposed to levels of PM 2.5 pollution that World Health Organization (WHO) deems safe. The WHO says concentrations higher than 5 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter is considered hazardous. 

The study described that while daily levels of air pollutants have decreased in North America and Europe in the two decades studied, levels increased in Australia, New Zealand, Southern Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Over 70 percent of the days monitored in these regions had air pollution that was above WHO recommended levels. The highest concentrations were generally found in southern Asia, eastern Asia, and northern Africa.

According to study co-author and global public health and epidemiologist Yuming Guo, there are seasonal patterns that take place amid unsafe PM2.5 concentrations. Northeast China and northern India saw higher levels during December, January, and February and eastern regions of North America had higher PM2.5 during summer months.  

“We also recorded relatively high PM2.5 air pollution in August and September in South America and from June to September in sub-Saharan Africa,” Guo said in a statement.

Guo told The Washington Post on March 6 that the study does have some limitations—some countries didn’t have as much ground data, which could affect how the models perform in those regions.

This study, possibly the first of its kind, aligns with data released by the WHO in April 2022 that also found that dangerous levels of air pollution affects 99 percent of the population. 

[Related: Wildfire smoke from across continents is changing the Arctic Ocean’s makeup.]

“Particulate matter, especially PM2.5, is capable of penetrating deep into the lungs and entering the bloodstream, causing cardiovascular, cerebrovascular (stroke) and respiratory impacts. There is emerging evidence that particulate matter impacts other organs and causes other diseases as well,” the WHO wrote in a statement last year.

Other studies have shown that even low levels of air pollution can increase excess mortality, traffic pollution could be connected to low birthweight, and is linked to an increased risk of depression and bipolar disorder. 

“[This study] provides a deep understanding of the current state of outdoor air pollution and its impacts on human health,” Guo said in a release. “With this information, policymakers, public health officials, and researchers can better assess the short-term and long-term health effects of air pollution and develop air pollution mitigation strategies.”

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Many Americans remained locked down and logged online throughout 2021, changing the way people shopped for countless goods and services. Initial coverage frequently focused on the ensuing supply chain woes, but new research is showcasing another grave consequence to all that consumption—the ocean shipping industry boom generated massive amounts of greenhouse gasses. 

Although their pollution statistics rarely make into the news as much as everyday cars, “dirty cargo ships” running on fossil fuels bring an estimated 40 percent of America’s goods into the country each year, and are a major impediment towards transitioning to a greener society. Because individual ships are often connected to dozens of international companies, it is often difficult to assign emissions regulation responsibilities. Meanwhile, thousands of ships burn sulfur-heavy “bunker fuel” that, while sometimes “scrubbed” via exhaust cleaning systems, still produces hazardous waste often dumped into oceans.

[Related: Is acid rain forming from the Ohio train derailment site?]

Commissioned by Ship It Zero, a coalition advocating for ocean freight companies’ transition to clean-energy, the “All Brands on Deck” report analyzes 2021’s international imports from 18 of America’s foremost retailers, including Walmart, The Home Depot, Target, Amazon, and Samsung. The findings aren’t pretty—an estimated 4.7 million containers traveling aboard over 1,650 ships generated approximately 3.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 alone. That’s equivalent to the carbon dioxide belched from 754,000 traditional gas-powered cars, or the energy required to power 440,000 US homes. As Canary Media also notes, “ships spewed enough smog-forming nitrogen oxide to equal the annual emissions of seven coal-fired power plants.”

Most of these imports entered the country through a few major port hubs: Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, alongside Houston, Texas, and Savannah, Georgia. The report explains that due to port  locations, much of the ocean vessels’ asthma- and cancer-causing pollutants most often affect port-adjacent and coastal communities with disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Brown working class populations.

Walmart, Target, and Home Depot were among the worst offenders analyzed. Their combined  shipping contracts generated over 1.7 million metric tons of CO2 and 33 metric tons of methane in 2021. “Buoyed by reliance on the cheapest, most deadly fossil fuels on the planet, international shipping companies and the corporations that rely on them make billions while treating our oceans, health and climate as externalities,” explains the report’s authors. “For far too long, they’ve gotten away with it.”

[Related: Breathe easier during wildfires with a DIY air purifier.]

Ship It Zero hopes that highlighting these troubling figures and increasing pressure on corporations will spur them to speed their transitions towards cleaner shipping options, like fuel cells, marine batteries, and wind harnessing equipment. Currently, both Walmart and The Home Depot have made no public commitments to fossil fuel-free maritime shipping plans, despite generating “the highest levels of carbon dioxide, methane and carcinogenic particulate matter pollution of all companies studied,” the report reads.

As part of their suggested path forward, Ship It Zero urges these companies to ask ocean carriers to demonstrate immediate and year-over-year emission reduction efforts during contract negotiation periods. “Any ship on the water today could be retrofitted with wind- assist propulsion or other emissions reducing technologies,” argues the authors. “[P]ublic health and the climate cannot wait for an entirely new generation of vessels.”

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Nearly a month after a train derailment in Ohio caused a toxic chemicals spill, the roughly 5,000 residents of East Palestine are worried about whether the air is safe to breathe. Since the accident, locals have complained of headaches, rashes, and a lingering smell in the air resembling “hair perming solution,” along with respiratory issues like chronic coughing, wheezing, and acute bronchitis, possibly from chemical irritants inflaming their airways. And now the concern has spread to people in other states.

Social media users living hundreds of miles away are posting videos showing alleged signs of acid rain and attributing it to air pollutants traveling from Ohio. There are also videos of individuals in other states saying they’re experiencing nausea and a burning sensation in their throats and noses due to a strong chemical odor in the rain. Some TikTokers have also attempted to explain how vinyl chloride, one of the main chemicals in the spill, is causing acid rain outside of East Palestine.

[Related on PopSci+: Dust clouds are killing people out West—and the dangers could spread]

Are their fears of traveling toxins justified? “Given the [high] amount of chemicals that were involved and the controlled conversion, I don’t think it’s a major issue for [people living] long-distance,” says Oladele Ogunseitan, a professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine. “I’m not saying it’s an absolute no because we don’t fully understand all the moving parts, but it’s just an infinitesimal chance.” 

First, what is acid rain?

Acid rain is any form of precipitation where water and oxygen react with nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide to form acidic compounds. While natural causes such as volcanic eruptions can release these chemicals, most acid rain events result from human activity, such as burning coal and other sulfur-containing compounds. 

Pure water has a neutral pH of 7, with regular rainfall being slightly more acidic with a pH of less than 6. Acid rain, however, usually falls between a range of 5 to 5.5 on the pH scale, meaning it’s more corrosive. 

Though making contact with acid rain won’t burn your skin off, you might experience irritation in your eyes, throat, and nose. The bigger issue is inhaling the chemical compounds in acid rain. The longer you spend time in acid rain, the likelier it is that pollutants will enter your lungs. Depending on how long you’re exposed and how many particles you inhale, acid rain can cause several long-term health problems, ranging from asthma and chronic bronchitis to heart attacks if you have a history of cardiac issues.

Can vinyl chloride cause acid rain?

In Ohio, officials decided on a “controlled release” after a temperature change in the five derailed train cars carrying vinyl chloride prompted worry about a possible larger explosion. Vinyl chloride—a synthetic, carcinogenic chemical used to make plastic for pipes, wire coatings, and car parts—was released in liquid form before being set ablaze for days in a barricaded area. Burning it breaks it down into hydrogen chloride, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and a toxic gas called phosphene. 

And while burning vinyl chloride can also produce hydrochloric acid, a component of acid rain, it would have been immediately seen at the site at the time of the controlled chemical release. Right now there are some “pretty bad smells” in East Palestine, says Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University, but not as much air pollution as there was on the first day. If the derailment was causing widespread acid rain, locals would experience it first.

What’s the current air pollution forecast in East Palestine?

After screening 578 homes in East Palestine over the past few weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that outdoor air quality in the residential area was normal and continued to assert that there are no health risks. Some environmental scientists, however, are skeptical of the clean-cut assessment. 

“What would prove if the place is habitable is if nobody gets sick, but we know people are having symptoms,” says Ogunseitan. A separate group of environmental researchers at Texas A&M University conducted their own air sample analysis in the town’s streets. In a Twitter thread posted last Friday, they shared that nine of the 50 chemicals identified by the EPA are at higher-than-normal levels. 

[Related: Breathe easier during wildfires with a DIY air purifier]

While the research is ongoing, the Texas A&M team warns of a potential health concern if levels of chemicals such as acrolein stay elevated. Acrolein can cause irritation in the skin, eyes, and mucous membranes. When inhaled, the suffocating odor may trigger respiratory distress and dizziness. 

Ogunseitan doesn’t think locals need to evacuate again based on this initial study, but does say it should raise the alarm for continuous air monitoring and health screenings for residents. He points out that some people might be more sensitive to even the smallest amount of exposure to toxic chemicals, so solution is to “identify those who are particularly vulnerable to these levels of chemicals and have them temporarily move.”

Is there any chance the chemicals will reach other states?

Based on the EPA’s air emission models on wind direction, rainfall, and the natural settling of dust and smoke from the derailment site, Ogunseitan says the data doesn’t support pollutants traveling as far as the East and West Coasts. When an incident like this happens, he notes there’s always a level of mass hysteria that has people blaming the incident for something unrelated. 

On the very slim possibility of pollutants wafting outside the East Palestine area, DeCarlo says his biggest concern would be for anyone living just across the border in Pennsylvania because of close proximity to the accident. “As you move away from the site, the emissions from the fire become diluted and less concentrated,” he explains. “For people living several states away, this will not be the same type of issue as those in the immediate area.”

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In Hawaii, every resident is estimated to generate 2.8 tons of waste annually. Practically every island in the state contains plastic litter and debris, including microplastics that may be detrimental to the growth and development of marine fish. To address this waste problem, the state has established bans on plastic bags, polystyrene foam food ware, and disposable plastic utensils in recent years. Now, they are taking it a step further. 

Last month, State Representative Sean Quinlan authored a bill banning the retail sale of single-use plastic bottles—specifically, those holding less than two liters of water—and submitted it to the Hawaiʻi State Legislature. Bottled water for emergency response and public health and safety are exempt from the ban. Although the bill is expected to come with significant environmental benefits, it doesn’t come without potential challenges and drawbacks.

A plastic bottle ban can reduce plastic waste

Plastic bottles make up a large fraction of plastic waste found in the environment. According to data from the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Ocean Conservancy, plastic beverage bottles are the second most littered item in the world.

“Reducing our dependence on plastic bottles, or any throwaway container solution, would certainly be a good thing for the environment,” says Spencer J. Ingley, assistant professor of biology at the Brigham Young University – Hawaii. 

The ocean is a major sink for plastic pollution. Beyond the visible impacts of plastic pollution, Ingley says the increased exposure to chemicals leached from plastics can also disrupt vital physiological functions in a wide variety of animals, including humans. By reducing the amount of waste entering the state as single-serving water bottles, there’s less plastic that must be landfilled or exported and lower potential to cause harm to marine ecosystems, adds Shelie Miller, a professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan.

[Related: How companies greenwash their plastic pollution.]

“As an island chain, Hawaii faces specific challenges that many states do not face,” says Miller. “With a large amount of coastline, it is easier for single-use plastic to escape into the ocean and have a direct impact on their marine ecosystem.” 

Eliminating the availability of smaller water bottles potentially incentivizes the use of water fountains and reusable containers. In addition, Miller says containers holding at least two liters of water “require less plastic per volume of water due to a lower surface area-to-volume ratio,” therefore a greater amount of water can be delivered without greatly increasing the amount of plastic.

The shift to other materials may pose some challenges

Although it’s beneficial, a ban on single-use plastic bottles may lead to unintended consequences. This includes a shift to other materials that may be less recyclable or reusable, like Ingley has observed with other single-use plastics in Hawaii. For example, he says vendors offer plant-based plastic utensils, but they’re “often not recyclable and just end up in our waste stream in similar volumes as their plastic relatives.”

“The high demand for small water containers will likely result in a shift to other materials, such as aluminum, glass, or paper cartons,” Ingley adds. “These are typically heavier than plastic bottles, and would therefore result in higher shipping costs, which would either eat into business profits or lead to higher consumer costs.”

Another example of this is California’s ban on plastic carryout bags. According to a 2019 study, the ban unintentionally increased the sales of unregulated plastics like trash bags because consumers previously reused carryout bags to throw their garbage out. Eliminating those bags created a greater market demand for purchasable trash bags, which use more plastic, says Ingley. Similar unintended consequences may occur with this latest bill.

Dealing with these other materials in the waste stream is another issue. Glass and aluminum are recyclable, but their production requires a significant amount of energy, he adds.

Consumer behavior is difficult to predict

If plastic bottles were to be banned, many individuals might switch to reusable water containers. However, despite being more eco-friendly than single-use plastic, Miller says they have to be reused enough times to offset the great number of materials needed to produce them.

“If a bottled water ban creates a spike in reusable water bottles that are not sufficiently reused, there could be a greater overall environmental impact associated with the production of reusable bottles,” she adds. There might also be a shift toward non-water beverages packed in single-use plastics that aren’t covered by the ban, says Miller, since the bill explicitly mentions water and not all beverages.

[Related: The best gallon water bottles of 2023.]

There may be negative health implications if consumers just decided to shift to other drinks instead of carrying a reusable water container. A 2015 study found that a bottled water ban at the University of Vermont led to the increased consumption of less healthy bottled drinks like sugar-sweetened beverages. It didn’t reduce the number of plastic bottles entering the waste stream like the ban initially intended.

The bill just passed its Second Reading earlier this week and will have to go through more stages before becoming law. “There are lots of challenges that consumers and businesses may face if this bill is passed,” says Ingley. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that it shouldn’t pass, but there are certainly some issues that should be considered further.”

At present, you can still purchase bottled water in Hawaii. However, if you want to reduce your environmental impact as much as possible, make the switch to a reusable water container today and be sure to use it frequently.

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In living rooms, backyards, and public parks throughout the country, baby showers are being replaced by something a bit more dramatic. Some of today’s expectant parents share their joy by “revealing” their child’s sex in parties that feature balloons, cake, and confetti in pink or blue (or occasionally purple, if the parents want to signal that they will not know their child’s chosen gender for many years to come). But the biggest ones, fueled by social media trends, go even further, involving extravagant stunts. And these spectacles can wreak havoc on the environment. 

A pink pigeon found in New York City, who some speculate was brightly colored for a gender reveal party, died from inhaling the dye’s toxins earlier this month. A couple who used a pyrotechnic device to reveal their baby’s gender started the El Dorado fire in California in 2020, which killed a firefighter and destroyed five homes and 15 buildings. An off-duty border patrol agent lit an Arizona forest on fire with a blue-colored explosive. And in one gender reveal party in Brazil, a couple dyed an entire river blue.

[Related:

[Related: How to build and extinguish a campfire without sparking a catastrophe]

While most gender reveal parties stick to colored cupcakes or other tame features, social media could be driving a few expectant parents to go bigger. Popular videos and posts can encourage people to mimic what others are doing, such as learning a TikTok dance, says Laura Tropp, a professor of communication arts at Marymount Manhattan College who specializes in representations of pregnancy, motherhood, and families in popular culture. Or they can take a trend to dangerous heights, which seems to be the case with the pigeon, river, and fires. Insurance companies are even posting liability advice for when reveals go wrong.

“You’re seeing this pressure on a lot of people to have the next-level gender reveal party,” Tropp says. “They involve color; they involve objects. And I think people love to watch all these extreme parties happening because they’re exciting.” 

Not only are gender reveals visual phenomena—they are also able to make what used to be a very private human experience something more social. “Pregnancy is long, most of it is just happening inside a woman’s body,” Tropp explains. “So it’s the ability to kind of take an aspect of pregnancy, move it outside a woman’s body, and then make it exciting. And then maybe make it extreme to get the social media views that people want.”

[Related: TikTokers are taking a diabetes drug to lose weight. Now it’s in short supply.]

Tropp says it’s all part of the commoditization of pregnancy and parenthood. The baby product industry is estimated to reach $352 billion by 2023, and offers everything from “it’s a boy!” hand sanitizer to edible glitter bombs. “There’s this pressure on parents to be a part of all these rituals that were never associated with pregnancy or parenting,” she notes. “Gender reveal parties are a part of this moment where you could publicly express an aspect of your pregnancy really early on. So I think we’re seeing this kind of shift from parenting starting at the moment of birth to parenting starting much, much earlier.”

But gender reveal parties are just one of many human rituals that can be harmful to the environment, according to Bron Taylor, a professor of religion, nature and ethics at the University of Florida, who has written about environmental ethics. “Fireworks are an obvious example,” he writes in an email to PopSci. “They pollute the air, soil, and water, and of course, their production, distribution, and use, contributes to anthropogenic climate disruption. But these practices, whether for nationalistic, calendrical, or religious rituals, are now so well-established, that many consider questioning them unthinkable … In this age of profound environmental crises, we should be rethinking everything, including every sort of ceremony and ritualized practice.” 

For those who still want to throw a gender reveal party, a good starting point may be to “eschew things that burn, explode, or otherwise risk hurting people or ecosystems,” Taylor says. Share your excitement in a responsible way—or you could just stick to cupcakes and piñatas.

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On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic and hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Although no injuries and fatalities have yet been reported, the crisis prompted evacuation requests for the nearly 5,000 residents of the East Palestine area and renewed widespread criticism of the American rail industry’s questionable safety regulations, strained workforce, and crumbling infrastructure.

Early reports place the blame on a broken axle, although further details appear to complicate the 50-car derailment. After the axle malfunctioned, onboard engineers pulled an emergency brake, but the brake also failed. Now, critics have shown a lengthy paper trail indicating Norfolk Southern’s persistent lobbying against safety reforms, alongside resistance to updating its trains’ brakes.

[Related: BP made $28 billion last year, and now it’s backtracking on its climate goals.]

Because of the cascading failures, emergency responders faced a potentially deadly situation. Toxic chemicals including vinyl chloride gas—used in making a variety of commonplace plastic products such as PVC piping and credit cards—filled 10 of the derailed freight cars and could have exploded, according to authorities. This could have sent shrapnel flying as far as a mile from the site. Officials ultimately decided on a controlled burn of the gas by funneling the vinyl chloride into a nearby trench that was then ignited, sending phosgene and hydrogen chloride to disperse in the air. Phosgene gas, which causes vomiting and respiratory issues, was used in chemical warfare during World War I and has been linked to emphysema and chronic bronchitis. On Sunday, it was confirmed that three additional dangerous chemicals were released following the crash, including the carcinogen ethylhexyl acrylate.

Although government officials cleared residents to return home, many are wary to do so. Some have even filed a federal lawsuit which would compel Norfolk Southern to set up routine health screenings for anyone living within a 30-mile radius of the crash.

[Related: Fossil fuels are causing a buildup of human health problems.]

David Masur, Executive Director of the PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center, called the East Palestine incident “a stark reminder of the threat posed to our cities, towns and communities from trains carrying explosive materials across Pennsylvania and the United States every day.” Masur and others are calling upon state and federal officials to instate greater inspection levels and oversight within the rail industry. “Ideally, freight companies should have to re-route trains carrying hazardous material away from populated areas,” says Masur, adding that, “if they continue driving current routes, the public and first responders have a right to know about trains coming through their communities.”

Last week, Norfolk Southern announced it would collectively pay 5,000 area residents $25,000, or roughly $5 per person. The railway company generated $12.7 billion in operating revenue during 2022—its most profitable year to date. 

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Since 2019, customers of almost 150 participating restaurants across New York City have had the option of receiving their takeout and delivery orders in returnable, reusable food containers thanks to DeliverZero. The third-party delivery service intends to reduce plastic waste, one reusable container at a time.

The convenience of takeaway food in today’s fast-paced, modern lifestyles might explain why the global market is estimated to reach $120.43 billion this year. However, as the founder of DeliverZero realized, the increasing reliance on to-go meals is not good for the environment. Plastic bags, food containers, cutlery, and other take-out items dominate global litter in most major aquatic environments around the globe.

In some cases, consumers are encouraged to bring reusable alternatives to minimize the waste generated by single-use takeaway containers. But the manufacture of reusable alternatives, because they need to be durable enough to withstand multiple uses, may use more energy and generate more greenhouse gasses (GHG) than the production of single-use ones.

That comparison—whether reusable takeout containers are always more sustainable than single-use ones—is answered by a new study. Reusable containers generally have lower impacts across most metrics than comparable single-use containers, according to a recent Resources, Conservation, and Recycling report. This research quantified environmental performance across different metrics, such as end-of-life waste, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primary energy usage, and water consumption.

“From a waste perspective, reusable containers are more environmentally preferable even when containers are used only four times,” says Christian Hitt, a graduate student from the University of Michigan and Center for Sustainable Systems research assistant who was an author of the study. However, it doesn’t just come down to the number of times you reuse the container. Many factors need to be considered when assessing whether a product is environmentally preferable over an alternative, he adds.

Transportation, washing, and other elements

Customer behavior can influence how sustainable a container is. For example, if only 5 percent of customers travel to the restaurant solely to return used containers, then the reusable system would have higher life cycle GHG emissions and primary energy use than single-use containers, the study found.

It was also common for customers to wash the container to some extent before returning it to the restaurant, the authors observed. This can be excessive since restaurants must still wash the container themselves before reusing it, says Hitt. If all customers ran the reusable container through the dishwasher before returning it, the life cycle energy impacts could be equal to or more than that of a single-use container. The washing method, water heater type, and electricity grid of the customer all factor in.

[Related: How to make your takeout order less wasteful.]

Individuals are recommended to follow the best practices with washing and transportation, says Hitt. For example, it’s better to scrape or rinse the reusable container with minimal cold water, as opposed to hand- or machine-washing. Returning the container with low-impact transportation, or only returning it when purchasing another meal or when the drop-off is along an already planned route, is also advisable, he adds.

The material composition of a takeout container is crucial, too. The authors considered the material type, like polypropylene (PP), polylactic acid (PLA), and aluminum, in their study. “PLA containers require high water consumption relative to other containers,” says Hitt. Containers also vary in GHG emissions due to differences in their production and disposal, he adds.

A 2019 Journal of Cleaner Production study similarly conducted a life-cycle assessment of four different takeout containers: single-use aluminum, expanded polystyrene (EPS), PP, and reusable PP. The authors found that single-use EPS containers are the best option when compared to reusable PP takeaway containers, because their manufacture uses fewer materials and less electricity. Reusable PP takeaway containers and “Tupperware” food savers would have to be reused three to 39 times and 16 to 208 times, respectively, to become a better option than EPS containers.

The number of reuses matters because it determines how many single-use containers were displaced over the life of the reusable container, says Alejandro Gallego Schmid, senior lecturer in Circular Economy and Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment at the University of Manchester, who was involved in the 2019 study. But single-use EPS containers have a major flaw: They are not usually recycled, because it is costly to do so, he adds, which means they cannot be considered a sustainable option.

Rules for restaurants and patrons

People who are conscious about making sustainable choices may reuse their own containers, but that’s not the same for all consumers. Therefore, says Gallego Schmid, restaurants and policymakers must make it easier for everyone to reuse and return containers.

Hitt agrees. “Restaurants should look into implementing reusable systems as this can reduce their environmental impact as well as foodware costs,” he says. “Implementing incentives such as discounts when returning containers could increase participation.”

[Related: How companies greenwash their plastic pollution.]

The restaurant chain Just Salad currently has two reusable bowl programs. In the first one, MyBowl, you can purchase a reusable bowl and receive a free topping every time you reuse it for in-store orders. With the second program, BringBack, you may opt to receive your meal in a green reusable bowl that you can return to participating drop-off locations. For the whole month of February, they are offering salads at a discounted price across all locations for customers who reuse their bowls for in-store purchases.

Meanwhile, lawmakers can ban or tax the use of single-use plastics and also provide grant money to fund reusable container programs. One way to allocate money this way is through a solid waste disposable tax (which is collected per ton of trash delivered to a dump) that could fund circular economy programs, says Hitt.

Outlawing certain carryout items can be effective, too. At least eight states have a ban on single-use plastic bags. Vermont goes even further with a more comprehensive plastics ban, which includes plastic straws, plastic stirrers, and EPS food and beverage containers.

Exploring alternatives to common takeaway containers is crucial, especially given the plastic crisis, says Gallego Schmid. A rigorous analysis of the environmental impacts of different takeout container materials is necessary, he adds, so consumers can be informed of what they use as they eat.

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In 2009, Prince Albert II of Monaco asked experimental vehicle manufacturer Venturi to take a crack at designing an electric vehicle that could handle the harsh cold of Antarctica. Over the next 12 years, the company went to work. After testing out two full prototypes, the company pulled off a final product launch on June 1, 2021. The Venturi Antarctica, as the vehicle is called, has been transporting scientists and lab equipment in eastern Antarctica since December 2021.

Designing an electric vehicle for the harsh climate of Antarctica is no easy feat. The battery and other components have to be able to tolerate the frigid Antarctic temperatures, and there needs to be space to store research equipment and transport the researchers comfortably. Venturi has experience with experimental electric vehicles going back to 2000, and has competed in Formula E, the top-tier electric car racing competition in the world, since its inaugural season in 2014. 

[Related: Boaty McBoatface’s new mission is more serious than its name]

According to Venturi, scientists based at the Belgian Princess Elizabeth research station have driven the Antarctica EV over 500 kilometers (310 miles) in just one summer of use. The vehicle has a range of 50 kilometers (31 miles), with space for a second battery if the scientists need more range. However, its range can vary depending on how compact the snow it has to drive on is, and scientists started noticing some problems. 

As climate change has affected global temperatures, Antarctica has warmed. Average temperatures on the icy continent ranges from a frigid -50 degrees Celsius (-58 F) inland to around -10 C (14 F) on the coasts, and the vehicle, designed for the extra cold, needed tweaks to tolerate the relative warmth. Venturi instructed researchers to limit trips to 40 kilometers (25 miles), and is beginning work on modifications to restore the vehicle to its true glory. 

Since Antarctica is covered almost entirely in snow, the Antarctica EV uses a continuous track system, just like you’d expect on a snowcat or a snowmobile. The treads spread the 5,500 pounds of vehicle over its entire surface area, preventing the Antarctica EV from sinking into the snow like a wheeled vehicle would. But the warmer temperatures have caused the snow to stick to the sprockets that drive the treads, creating unwanted vibrations that could further damage the vehicle. The company has since redesigned and replaced the sprockets in an attempt to keep the vehicle in working order.

Increasing temperatures also made it more likely for the cabin, which is packed with electronics and exposed to the sun, to overheat. To balance that out, Venturi has had to install a new ventilation system for a more comfortable riding experience. They also made a new cooling system for the power electronic systems themselves.

Venturi announced on January 24 that their next set of improvements will be focused on redesigning the treads and increasing the vehicle’s range in Antarctica. Barring any other unforeseen circumstances, these should allow the vehicle to putter around the ice and snow of the southern continent more and more in the years to come.

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Air pollution is linked to numerous health concerns, from asthma to an increase in the amount and severity of lung and heart disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers air pollution a public health issue and their data estimates that 99 percent of the world breathes air with harmful levels of pollutants. 

Government regulations are a major tool in improving air quality. A study published February 1 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology finds that stricter clean heating policies put in place by China may have reduced 23,000 premature deaths in 2021 compared to 2015.

[Related: Coal and transportation fueled a surge in US carbon emissions last year.]

China has historically utilized  a centralized winter heating strategy that provides free or heavily subsidized heating to cities from about mid-November to March. Biomass burning, or burning wood and other vegetation for warmth, iswas also often used for heating in rural areas. This combination of biomass and coal burning is often associated with haze during China’s winters. 

In 2013, China introduced the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan which accelerated the use of a centralized heating district and encouraged a switch to cleaner fuels. Coal still accounted for 83 percent of total heating in 2016, but the Chinese central government issued its Clean Winter Heating Plan for Northern China the following year. 

[Related: Why China just can’t seem to quit coal.]

Between 2015 and 2021, Beijing, Tianjin, and 26 surrounding cities (known as the “2+26” cities) saw concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) reduced by 41.3 percent. Other northern Chinese that did not enact the same heating policy saw a 13 percent decrease. The team found that the premature deaths from poor air quality fell from 169,016 in 2015 to 145,460 in 2021.

“Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of China’s clean winter heating policies on reducing PM_2.5  – with particular success for the stricter clean heating policies in ‘2 + 26’ cities, which also led to a reduced impact of heating emissions on sulfur dioxide (SO2),” said study co-author and atmospheric biogeochemist Zongbo Shi, from the University of Birmingham, in a statement. “These results demonstrate clear air quality benefits from the stricter clean heating policies in ‘2 + 26’ cities.”

According to the study, evaluating the effectiveness of clean heating policies is difficult due to complicated chemical and physical processes in the atmosphere and socioeconomic factors. The team from Nankai University in Tianjin and the University of Birmingham in England used a new method that combined machine learning and a synthetic control method, which evaluates an intervention’s effect.

“Using a novel approach combining machine learning with causal inference, we showed that heating in northern China was a major source of air pollution,” said Shi. “However, clean heating policies have caused the annual PM_2.5 in mainland China to reduce significantly between 2015 and 2021, with significant public health benefits.”

Further decarbonizing measures will continue to help clean the air, according to the study. 

[Related: Tiny air pollutants may come from different sources, but they all show a similar biased trend.]

“Clean heating policies in northern China not only reduced air pollution but also greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to China’s push for carbon neutrality. However, we found that heating remains an important source of air pollution in northern China, particularly in cities that are not part of the ‘2+26’ cluster,” said Robert Elliot, study co-author and applied economist from the University of Birmingham, in a statement. “Decarbonizing heating should remain a key part of China’s carbon neutrality strategy that not only reduces air pollution but also provide[s] significant public health benefits.”

China still has a steep hill to climb to decarbonize as a whole. It aims to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030 and become carbon-neutral by 2060. While it is installing renewable energy rapidly, it still built 33 gigawatts of new coal plants in 2021 and hit a record-breaking 4.07 billion tonnes of coal output that same year.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Plastics produced from plants are often considered less environmentally damaging than plastics made from petrochemicals. But scientists are warning that we should be careful making such assumptions.

A new literature review examining the results of around 20 scientific papers has found that bio-based plastics, most of which are made from cornstarch, can be just as toxic as their conventional cousins when dumped in coastal environments. The review also shows that plastics marked as biodegradable often fail to break down in these environments.

The paper highlights the lack of research into the environmental toxicity of bioplastics. The authors write that, for now at least, regulations on bioplastics need to be as tight as those for petroleum-based polymers.

Bioplastic production has boomed in recent years on the back of concerns around plastic waste and the carbon footprint of plastic production. According to European Bioplastics, an industry association, 2.4 million tonnes of bioplastics was made globally in 2021—a number expected to triple to around 7.5 million tonnes by 2026. This represents less than two percent of global plastic production.

The term bioplastics is quite broad. It covers both bio-based plastics, which are made from plants or other non–fossil fuel organic matter rather than petroleum, and biodegradable plastics, whether bio-based or made from fossil fuels.

Bioplastics also aren’t necessarily different from conventional plastics, says Martin Wagner, an environmental toxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the review but whose work was included in the analysis. While some bioplastics are new chemical compounds, others are chemically identical to conventional plastics, just produced from carbon derived from plants rather than fossil fuels.

While acknowledging that there is not a lot of data available, and that much of it focuses on the same few bioplastics (such as polylactic acid and polyhydroxyalkanoates, which are mainly produced from starch from plants such as maize, sugar cane, and soybean), the review’s authors suggest that the toxic effects of bioplastics on marine and estuarine life can be of a similar magnitude as those from conventional plastics.

For instance, some of the studies included in the review show that both conventional plastics and bio-based plastics can affect how well mussels attach to rocks. They can also affect the activity of enzymes in the mussels’ digestive systems and gills, and provoke an immune response and kick-start detoxification mechanisms.

However, bioplastics also come with their own unique problems. Bio-based plastics, the review shows, can affect the marine environment in different ways than conventional plastic. For instance, two studies showed that plastic bags derived from cornstarch decrease the level of dissolved oxygen in marine substrates. The cornstarch plastic also causes the seafloor substrate to heat up. The authors of one paper suggest that the bioplastic had a sealing effect on the sediment.

The failure of plastics certified as biodegradable or compostable to break down under marine conditions is not particularly surprising. Degradable bioplastics are designed to break down and convert at least 90 percent of their material into carbon dioxide under specific composting, industrial, and laboratory conditions, not on the beach or the seafloor. But the reviewed studies found that in realistic marine conditions, degradation rates vary hugely depending on the thickness and type of bioplastic. While some items completely degraded or disintegrated in a few months, others could take years to completely degrade.

Wagner says the attitude that some people hold that everything that is biological is better is problematic and based on wishful thinking. “I think the underlying assumption that just because it is bio-based or biodegradable that makes it safer needs to be challenged because there is just no logical reasoning why that should be,” he explains.

Elena Fabbri, an expert in plastic toxicity at the University of Bologna in Italy who also wasn’t involved in the review, agrees: “It’s not correct to say that bioplastics are necessarily safer.”

Bioplastic development has focused on renewable feedstocks and sustainability, Wagner claims, but neglected the products’ sometimes unique safety issues. He says his work on bioplastics, such as starch-based and bamboo-based plastics, has shown that they contain toxic chemicals comparable to those in petroleum-based plastics. These toxic compounds could be either additives used to improve the functional performance of plastic, or substances added unintentionally, such as byproducts created during manufacturing, he explains.

Fabbri echoes Wagner, highlighting that many bioplastics contain thousands of additives. She adds that a large part of the problem is that manufacturers do not have to list the additives they use. This makes it challenging for researchers to identify these chemicals, she adds, as they do not know what they are looking for.

While Fabbri believes bioplastics are a good innovation, she says we need to be certain they are safe and sustainable—and this includes the products of their degradation.

“If you produce bioplastic as a safer plastic, you should also ensure that everything coming out from those plastics—the microplastics, the fragments, and the leaching compounds—are safer as well,” Fabbri explains.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Researchers at the University of Birmingham have laid out a new, closed loop retrofit for industrial iron and steel furnaces that could reduce their overall greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 90 percent. If successfully implemented, the novel approach could be a gamechanger for some of the world’s most pesky polluters.

Steelmaking is one of modern society’s literal building blocks, but it comes at steep environmental costs—today, the iron and steel industries compose nearly 10 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. The issues stem from traditional blast furnace operations, which requires distilling coal in coke ovens which eventually produce carbon monoxide. Once the coke interacts with iron ore in the furnace, its resultant “top gas” composed mainly of CO, CO2, and N2 is then burned to raise its air blast temperature as high as 1350C, with leftover pollutants released into the outside air.

[Related: The next generation of US nuclear plants could be tiny but powerful

Currently, the vast majority of plans for decarbonising the sector require phasing out existing steel and iron furnaces for renewable energy-powered electric arc facilities, or EAFs. Unfortunately, EAFs can cost billions of dollars to construct, making them an unlikely candidate for large-scale adoption in the timeframe necessary to stave off the worst of our climate crises.

As highlighted in their recent paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, however, the team at the University of Birmingham was able to capture CO2 from traditional furnaces’ top gas and reduce it to carbon monoxide and oxygen using a “perovskite” material made of a crystalline mineral latticework. The perovskite requires much lower temperatures to facilitate the chemical reactions which can be generated by either renewable energy sources, or even heat exchangers simply connected to the furnaces. Both the carbon monoxide and oxygen is then fed back into the furnace where needed in the steelmaking process to form a nearly perfect closed loop system.

[Related: Mexico bans solar geoengineering tests after US startup’s unsanctioned ‘science project’.]

According to researchers, if their method is implemented in the UK’s two remaining blast furnace plants, it could save over $1.5 billion within 5 years while reducing the country’s overall emissions by nearly 3 percent. Extrapolate that to the global steel and iron industries, and it’s easy to imagine how this could provide a huge boost towards our transition towards greener infrastructure.

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It’s been a pretty volatile couple of years for the world’s energy market. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the economy rapidly rebounding after COVID-19 lockdowns and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused record breaking spikes in the price of natural gas and oil prices hit their highest level since 2008 last year.

Three sites in Qatar are home to over 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas exports. But these site should monitored especially closely, because if an oil spill were to happen, an even more serious energy crisis would be eminent, according to a new study.

[Related: Yemen’s defunct oil tanker could set off a public health crisis.]

The study published January 12 by an international team of researchers in the journal Nature Sustainability pinpoints the location of a “high vulnerability zone” in the peninsula where an oil spill could shut down liquified natural gas export facilities and desalination plants on the coast for several days. 

To identify the offshore areas of the Qatar Peninsula that are vulnerable, the team used advanced numerical modeling to corollate data measured over the past five years on maritime data transports, circulation in the atmosphere, ocean currents, waves, and seafloor topographic map data.

They found that shutting down activity due to an oil spill in the most vulnerable area would almost certainly disrupt the global gas supply chain. A spill-induced shut down would also cause a significant water shortage for one of the world’s most at-risk countries for water scarcity. Qatar has used desalination to balance out its limited supply of groundwater for its growing population, but the process consumes a huge amount of energy.

According to the team, awareness of these vulnerability is imperative, especially since Qatar’s export capacity is expected to increase by approximately 64 percent over the next five years. Thus, this key port will continue to be a crucial hotspot in the global energy supply chain. An increased number of tanker incidents in the Gulf is also a concern, since these accidents could impact critical coastal infrastructure like the needed desalination plants.

[Related: What a key natural-gas pipeline has to do with the Russia-Ukraine crisis.]

Tanker ships—one of which can carry about enough energy to heat all of London for one week—crossing this area are the main risks for oil spills, not the oil rigs in the northern part of the Peninsula. The study finds that Qatar would only have a few days to contain an oil spill before the slicks would reach the country’s main liquefied gas export facility and desalination plant. Disruptions or a total shutdown of the desalination plant for just a day would force Qatar to rely on a small groundwater reserve and would increase liquified natural gas prices.  

To prevent the worst from happening, the study suggests increasing remote sensing in the Gulf’s most vulnerable areas with satellite and airborne images to increase warning times for spills and track how they evolve.

The study argues that the current vulnerability to environmental hazards in the Middle East is largely underestimated. Threats to water resources due to climate change was listed as the biggest threat to the Arab countries in the most recent Arab Barometer Report, a survey of 26,000 people in 12 countries conducted from October 2021 to July 2022.

“Global containment of major oil spills has always been challenging, but it is even harder in the shallow water of the Gulf where any intervention has to account for the complex circulation currents, a harsh operational environment, and the presence of highly-sensitive ecosystems on which three million humans rely for drinking water,” said co-author Essam Heggy from the University of Southern California Arid Climate and Water Research Center, in a statement. “I hope serious resources are put into resolving this vulnerability.”

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At this point, there’s no denying that plastic pollution is ubiquitous. It appears in the remote corners of the Earth, the food chain, and even human bodies. To protect human and environmental health, global plastic pollution must be addressed.

With increasing public concern about climate change, companies might face higher expectations regarding corporate responsibility, especially those known to cause significant environmental impacts. 

In a recent One Earth study, the authors looked into the commitments made by the world’s largest companies between 2015 to 2020 to reduce plastic pollution. Based on the study, about 72 percent of the world’s largest companies have made some form of commitment to reducing plastic pollution, which ranges from one line of text to many pages of commitment. 

Although some companies have made commitments in recent years to reduce their plastic footprint, the work doesn’t end there—it’s necessary to analyze how effective they are at reducing plastic pollution. 

Corporate commitments have a limited impact on global plastic pollution

There’s no penalty for not fulfilling a non-binding commitment, especially when it comes from the company itself. It’s important to validate whether or not companies are doing what they actually promise to do, says Shelie Miller, a professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan.

Companies’ commitments frequently involve waste reduction strategies, like increasing recycled or recyclable content in packaging and advancing recycling-related efforts, notably paying less attention to how virgin plastic production can be reduced. For example, Nestlé Waters North America—now known as BlueTriton Brands—made a goal in 2008 to double the recycling rates for PET plastic, the kind of plastic used for water bottles, to 60 percent. However, the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) reported in 2018 that the average recycling rate of PET bottles hasn’t changed that much over the past decade.

Based on current trends, efforts to improve waste management may be overshadowed by the production and consumption of virgin plastic. Annual virgin plastic production is estimated to increase to 1.1 billion tonnes in 2050. By that time, the petrochemicals used to produce virgin plastic polymers may very well account for nearly half of the growth in oil demand, surpassing trucks, aviation, and shipping.

“We found limited evidence to suggest that corporate commitments are actually reducing the amount of global plastic pollution,” says Zoie Diana, a PhD candidate in the Division of Marine Science and Conservation at Duke University and author of the recent One Earth study. “Unfortunately, we found reports of companies lightweighting plastic.”

Lightweighting is a practice where companies slightly reduce the volume of plastic in their packaging, like making thinner PET bottles or shorter bottle caps, which you’ve probably already noticed in your local grocery store. While it’s good that companies produce lighter and smaller plastic products, if they reinvest their savings into markets that involve new plastic products, they might only increase the total mass of plastic produced, says Diana.

Companies usually strive to increase their sales, so even if less plastic is used per package, the number of packaging units is likely to increase. For instance, products like shampoo or coffee are often sold in tiny packets or sachets, which use more packaging material compared to larger product sizes. In addition, reducing the weight of plastic packaging doesn’t make the product any less likely to become trash.

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit.]

Sometimes, consumers are misled by products that aren’t as green as they seem. Bioplastics, produced wholly or in part from renewable biomass sources, are considered the more environmentally friendly alternative to petroleum-based plastics. However, they can still contribute to plastic pollution, global warming, and land use because not all bioplastics are the same and they aren’t always biodegradable.

While some bioplastics like those derived from cornstarch decompose in the soil, others only break down at high temperatures or after being treated in a landfill under very specific conditions. Even biodegradable bioplastics can still end up in landfills and produce methane gas as they decompose. Bioplastics made from crops also use up land that could have been used for growing food. It’s important to remember that bioplastics are still just plastics, even if they are made from a different material.

Boxed water products, often touted as an eco-friendly alternative to bottled water due to the paper-based carton packaging, also appear to be better for the environment than they really are. In reality, the cartons aren’t made entirely from paper because they require plastic film and aluminum to waterproof the paper and seal the content. Moreover, they’re not necessarily easier to recycle. Only 60 percent of households in the country have access to carton recycling, whereas 87 percent of the U.S. population has access to a municipal collection of PET bottles.

Companies must reduce plastic production and overall consumption

Although recycling is an important step aimed at reducing plastic pollution, it’s not that effective. A 2017 Science Advances study reported that only nine percent of the plastic ever created had been recycled. Aside from the 12 percent of plastics that were incinerated, this means that all the plastics that were produced remain in landfills or the natural environment, continuing to pollute the planet. Even if recycling efforts were improved, they might be unlikely to keep pace with the growing rate of plastic consumption.

“We suspect that, at best, the emphasis on recycling found in this study reflects industry efforts to raise global recycling rates and, at worst, reflects industry attempts to shift responsibility toward consumers, greenwashing, and potential pre-emption of legislation aimed at reducing plastic pollution,” says Diana.

A number of companies recently explored creative ways to minimize their plastic use. In 2018, brewing company Carlsberg introduced its Snap Pack to dramatically cut plastic waste. They did away with plastic rings by bonding a six-pack of beer cans together with glue instead. When all of their four-, six-, and eight-pack beers globally have been converted to use this innovation, it would save about 1323 tons of plastic annually, the equivalent of around 60 million plastic bags. Meanwhile, Walmart Canada eliminated plastic wraps of organic banana bunches and single peppers in 2019, preventing almost 94,000 kilograms of plastic waste. 

Commitments like lightweighting and more recycling only divert attention from preventive measures that reduce virgin plastic production. The tap on unnecessary plastic production must be turned off, but only three percent of the top 300 companies on the Fortune Global 500 explicitly targeted virgin or newly produced plastics, says Diana. Unilever has a current pledge to halve the amount of virgin plastic they use in their packaging by 2025.

“Many companies focus on making packaging more recyclable or increasing the recycled content in their products,” says Miller. “While these efforts are an improvement over the status quo, they do not fully eliminate the environmental impacts of plastic.”

[Related: Dozens of companies with ‘net-zero’ goals just got called out for greenwashing.]

According to PepsiCo, 87 percent of its packaging is recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable. The multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation hopes to reach 100 percent by 2025. However, Miller notes that improving the ability of packaging to be recycled doesn’t necessarily ensure that it will actually be recycled in practice. Furthermore, a recyclable plastic that escapes waste streams and ends up in the environment can cause just as much ecological damage as a non-recyclable one, she adds.

The environmental impact of plastic pollution can only be partially addressed through improved packaging and recycling efforts because plastics don’t just cause harm when they are discarded. Starting from their production, they already contribute emissions that occur through natural gas extraction and plastic manufacturing. In the United States alone, fossil fuel extraction and production associated with plastic manufacturing contributed at least 9.5 to 10.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalents back in 2015. Therefore, reducing plastic production and consumption remains to be a critical part of addressing plastic pollution.

“We tend to focus on visible impacts such as solid waste generation, but there are also upstream environmental impacts that are usually invisible to us,” says Miller. “The best way to reduce the environmental impacts of plastic is to reduce overall consumption. Reducing the amount of stuff that we consume is key to reducing environmental impact, not just making it easier to recycle.”

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The world’s aquatic habitats are a heady brew of pollutants. An estimated 14 million tons of plastic enter the ocean as trash each year. Further inland, more than 40 percent of the world’s rivers contain a pharmacopeia from humans, including antidepressants and painkillers. Heavy metals like mercury from industrial waste can also make an appearance. And agricultural fertilizer can leach from the soil into rivers, eventually reaching the ocean.

There are an estimated 20,000 species of fish in the world — and possibly many more. They and many other organisms that live in “contaminated systems are contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals,” said Michael Bertram, a behavioral ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Studies.

Bertram and other researchers are increasingly finding that these compounds may alter fish behavior. In some experiments, the pollutants appear to alter how fish socialize, either by exposing them to psychoactive drugs or by altering their natural development, which may change how they swim together and mate. Others appear to make fish take more risks which, in the wild, could increase their odds of getting unceremoniously taken out by predators.

The effects of the pollution, according to researchers working in the field, still have many unknowns. This is due in part to the vast number of variables in real ecosystems, which can limit scientists’ abilities to infer how pollutants impact fish in the wild, said Quentin Petitjean, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental sciences at Institut Sophia Agrobiotech in France, and co-author of a 2020 paper that looked at existing literature on pollution and fish behavior. “In the wild, fish and other organisms are exposed to a plethora of stressors,” he said.

Still, these altered behaviors could have big impacts, according to Bertram. Like many living things, fish are important parts of their ecosystems, and changing their behavior could hinder or alter their roles in unexpected ways. For instance one study suggests that various chemical pollutants and microplastics can impact the boldness of prey fish species. Although the authors note that this isn’t likely to lead to population collapse, these “subtle behavior modifications” could reduce fish biomass, alter their size, and ultimately harm predators as well. Just this one effect, they add, “may be a hidden mechanism behind ecosystem structure changes in both freshwater and marine ecosystems.”

But humans have a funny way of showing their appreciation. One example: People regularly flush psychoactive substances, which then find their way into aquatic ecosystems. In 2021, Bertram and a team of researchers published a paper digging into how a common antidepressant, fluoxetine, better known under the brand name Prozac, affected guppies’ propensity for shoaling, or swimming in groups. Over two years, the team exposed groups of guppies to different concentrations of fluoxetine: a low concentration (commonly seen in the wild), a high concentration (representative of an extremely contaminated ecosystem), and no fluoxetine at all.

At the high exposure concentration, the guppies appeared to be more social, spending more time shoaling. However, this was only the case in of male-female pairs, not when the fish swam solo. Previous research by Bertram and colleagues shows that the medication increases the amount of time guppy males spend pursuing females. “Being intensely courted” by males, Bertram said, the females will preferentially choose the larger school to distract them and “to avoid this incessant mating behavior.”

While drugs like Prozac are designed to change brain function, there are other, perhaps less obvious ways pollution can change behavior. For instance, pollutants may alter the microbiome, the collection of microscopic organisms like fungi and bacteria that exist on or in an organism. In humans, disruptions of microbial life have been linked to disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, dementia, or even simply cognitive impairment. Research published in 2022 suggests that fish brains may also rely on the collection of minuscule organisms.

In the study, researchers worked with two groups of zebrafish embryos that they had rendered germ-free, functionally stripping them of microbes. Into the containers holding one group of embryos, the team immediately introduced water from a tank with full-grown zebrafish to give the disinfected population a microbiome. After a week, they did the same for the other group.

After yet another week, the researchers ran a series of experiments, putting two fish from the same group in neighboring tanks to see if they would swim alongside each other, a shoaling behavior previously identified.

The fish deprived of an early life microbiome spent much less time doing this behavior than those in the control group. Of the 54 control fish, nearly 80 percent spent their time near the divider between the tanks, compared to around 65 percent of the 67 in the other group. Exposure to microbes early in life is important for the development of social behavior, said Judith Eisen, a neuroscientist and one of the paper’s authors.

The researchers also looked at the brains of the fish using powerful microscopes. Normally, cells called microglia move from the gut to the brain early in the fishes’ lives, Eisen said, around the time their microbiome starts to develop. The fish that lived without microbiomes for a week, she and the team found, had fewer microglia in a particular brain region which has been previously linked to the shoaling behavior. In normal brains (including human ones), these cells perform synaptic pruning, which clears away weaker or less used connections.

Of course, the germ-free state of those zebrafish, Eisen said, would not exist in nature. However, some human pollutants like pesticides, microplastics, and metals like cadmium appear to alter fish microbiomes. Considering shoaling is often a protective behavior, a diminished shoaling response may cause problems in the wild. “If it doesn’t want to hang out with other fish — that might open it up to predation,” Eisen said.

Pollutants can impact behavior beyond shoaling, and saltwater ecosystems as well. In a 2020 study, researchers took Ambon damselfish larvae back to the lab and exposed some of them to microplastic beads. Then, they returned the young fish to different stretches of the Great Barrier reef — some of which were degraded and others that were still healthy — and observed how they acted. The team had also tagged the fish with tiny fluorescent tags, and returned to the reef several times over three days to check on their survival rate.

The fish that had been exposed to microplastics showed more risk-taking behavior and survived for less time before being preyed upon, according to the study. Nearly all the tagged fish that were exposed to microplastics and set free near dead reefs died after around 50 hours. Meanwhile, around 70 percent of unexposed fish released near living reefs survived past the 72-hour mark. According to the paper, while the health of the reef was a factor in risk behavior, fish exposed to the plastics had a survival rate six times lower than those not exposed to the compounds.

According to Alexandra Gulizia, one of the paper’s authors and a Ph.D. student at James Cook University, there needs to be more work looking into the components of plastics and how they affect fish. For instance, bisphenol-A, more commonly known as BPA, is a common additive to make plastics more flexible. It also appears in natural habitats and research suggests it can decrease aggression in fish. Gulizia added: “I think that we’re only just touching the surface of the chemical impacts that microplastics are having on fish and fish behavior.”

How this all plays out in the wild is hard to assess. Eisen noted that other factors that could impact the microbiome include nutrients in the water, water temperature, diet, and salt concentration. Another, perhaps more direct complication: Contaminants can appear simultaneously, and in different amounts, Petitjean said. For instance, one 2016 paper shows that 13 percent of 426 pollutants in European rivers have been shown to be neuroactiv

Another complication is simply that not all organisms will act the same — even within the same species. According to Eisen, model organisms, such as zebrafish, are chosen to represent a wide range of species, just as mice are often used to study human health in medical research. But changes to pollutants and other factors could differ from species to species. Bertram noted that using model organisms saves researchers the trouble of studying every single species, but also that there should be more studies into different fish.

At face value, some behavior changes might not even look that bad. Increased mating behavior — like in the case of guppies exposed to fluoxetine — could seem like a boon for the species. However, one species thriving over another tends to throw natural habitats out of whack, Bertram said. His previous work suggests that Prozac similarly increases invasive eastern mosquitofish mating behavior. This could help it thrive and outcompete native species. Additionally, at some concentrations, cadmium can increase fish activity, potentially helping them find food. However, the more they eat, Petitjean said, the more exposed they could be to microplastics.

Given these circumstances, he added, experiments in the lab need to inject as much complexity as possible into their methods to better replicate real, wild systems. Some research does try this. Bertram’s work showed the test guppies either a predatory or a similarly sized, non-predatory fish prior to their experiments, while Gulizia and her team performed parts of their experiment in the wild. Some studies also expose fish species to water taken from the environment — and the pollutants that come with it.

Despite the unknowns, Bertram said that changes to how fish go about socializing, mating, or finding food are unlikely to be good. “At the end of the day,” he continued, “any change to the expression of natural behaviors will have negative, unintended consequences.”

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