bisphenol
MEPs block Commission from widening endocrine disruptor definition.
MEPs today blocked a Commission proposal that would have exempted some chemicals from being identified as endocrine disruptors due to wider criteria.
MEPs block Commission from widening endocrine disruptor definition
By Niamh Michail
04-Oct-2017 - Last updated on 04-Oct-2017 at 14:31 GMT
1 COMMENT
MEPs today blocked a Commission proposal that would have exempted some chemicals from being identified as endocrine disruptors due to wider criteria.
The Commission must now come up with a new proposal, taking MEP's requests into account.
The Parliament, which voted on the issue this afternoon (4 October) needed an absolute majority of 376 votes to veto the proposal, which it narrowly won with 389 votes in favour, 235 against and 70 abstentions.
The objection, co-signed by MEP Bas Eickhout, a member of the Greens and European Free Alliance (EFA) party, and backed by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), said the Commission had exceeded its mandate by proposing to exempt some substances from the scope of criteria for identifying the chemicals
The Commission’s proposal can be read here.
Environmental Scientist at Pesticide Action Network (PAN), Angeliki Lyssimachou, said the vote was an example of "true democracy in action".
The result of the vote was also welcomed by pan-EU consumer group BEUC which said the Commission's "unfit definition" would have seen too many chemicals escape the regulatory net.
The ENVI committee objection reads: "The specification of scientific criteria for the determination of endocrine-disrupting properties may only be performed objectively, in the light of scientific data relating to that system, independently of all other considerations, in particular economic ones."
Exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals, which are used in food packaging and on pesticides and biocides in food production, has been linked to decreased fertility, a rise in endocrine-related cancers, low sperm quality, obesity and cognition deficit and neurodegenerative diseases, according to one 2015 study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
Ahead of the vote, Eickhout said: "It is unacceptable that the Commission tries to lift a ban of certain endocrine disrupters via the backdoor of comitology to further the interests of the pesticides industry. The Commission has a mandate to come up with scientific criteria for endocrine disrupters, but not to undo a ban decided by the legislator.”
According to Eickhout, the vote was “an opportunity to halt the Commission from exceeding its powers, insist on the rule of law and maintain existing restrictions".
RULE OF LAW wins! European Parliament just stopped Commission from exceeding its power, on #endocrinedisrupters, by 389/235/70 @GreensEP
— FoodPolicyRevolution (@FoodRevEU) October 4, 2017
Chemicals known or suspected to be endocrine disruptors are used not just in pesticides but in food packaging, cosmetics and toys.
The Danish Consumer Council tested tins of peeled tomatoes and found five out of eight contained bisphenol A.
Meanwhile the French group UFC Que-Choisir commissioned laboratory tests and found known or suspected endocrine disruptors, such as ethylhexyl methoxycinnamate, in seven out of 17 suncreams.
Chemical cocktails
Yesterday, PAN published a report which showed the extent of endocrine disrupting pesticide residues found in EU food on the market.
Using 2015 monitoring data for 45,889 fresh fruit and vegetable samples that it acquired through a public access request, it found that just over one third (34%) of fruit consumed in Europe contained endocrine disrupting pesticides. Citrus fruit mandarins, oranges and grapefruit were the worst offenders – between 46 and 57% of samples contained residues with EDPs.
Celery and rocket were the worst offenders for vegetables, with 35 to 40% of samples containing residues.
Several fruit and vegetables contained up to eight EDPs per sample, for which the “collective toxic potential effects are not assessed”, PAN said.
The report reads: “Governments should put consumers’ health and the protection of the environment before the profit of the pesticide industry, which will always push to use more pesticides in agriculture, even though the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive 2009/128/EC34 calls all member states to use synthetic pesticides only as a last resource, after (and provided that) all non-chemical methods have failed.”
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Male infertility crisis in US has experts baffled.
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
Hagai Levine doesn’t scare easily. The Hebrew University public health researcher is the former chief epidemiologist for the Israel Defense Forces, which means he’s acquainted with danger and risk in a way most of his academic counterparts aren’t. So when he raises doubts about the future of the human race, it’s worth listening. Together with Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Levine authored a major new analysis that tracked male sperm levels over the past few decades, and what he found frightened him. “Reproduction may be the most important function of any species,” says Levine. “Something is very wrong with men.”
That’s something you may not be used to hearing. It may take a man and a woman—or at least a sperm and an egg—to form new life, but it is women who bear the medical and psychological burden of trying to get—and stay—pregnant. It is women whose lifestyle choices are endlessly dissected for their supposed impact on fertility, and women who hear the ominous tick of the biological clock. Women are bombarded with countless fertility diets, special fertility-boosting yoga practices and all the fertility apps they can fit on their phone. They are the targets of a fertility industry expected to be valued at more than $21 billion globally by 2020. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fixates on women, tracking infertility in the U.S. by tallying the number of supposedly infertile women. “It is as if the entire medical realm is shaped to cater to women’s infertility and women’s bodies,” says Liberty Barnes, a sociologist and the author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity. “For men, there’s just nothing there.”
That absence might be understandable if women were solely responsible for the success or failure of a pregnancy. But they’re not. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the male partner is either the sole or contributing cause in about 40 percent of cases of infertility. Past infections, medical conditions, hormonal imbalances and more can all cause what is known as male factor infertility. Men even have their own version of a biological clock. Beginning around their mid-30s, male fertility gradually degrades, and while most men produce sperm to their dying day, those past 40 who help conceive have a greater risk of passing on genetic abnormalities to their children, including autism. “Men are a huge part of this problem,” says Barbara Collura, the president and CEO of Resolve: the National Infertility Association.
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Startling new evidence suggests male infertility may be much worse than it appears. According to Levine and Swan’s work, sperm levels—the most important measurement of male fertility—are declining throughout much of the world, including the U.S. The report, published in late July, reviewed thousands of studies and concluded that sperm concentration had fallen by 59.3 percent among men in Western countries between 1973 and 2011. Four decades ago, the average Western man had a sperm concentration of 99 million per milliliter. By 2011, that had fallen to 47.1 million. The plummet is alarming because sperm concentrations below 40 million per milliliter are considered below normal and can impair fertility. (The researchers found no significant declines for non-Western men, in part because of a lack of quality data, though other studies have found major drops in countries like China and Japan.) And the decline has grown steeper in recent years, which means that the crisis is deepening. “This is pretty scary,” says Swan, who has long studied reproductive health. “I think we should be very concerned about this trend.”
Although there have reports of declining sperm counts before, they were easy to ignore. Research on sperm levels has been spotty, using different methodologies and drawing from varying groups, making it difficult to know that the declines some scientists observed were real, and not a function of miscounting. Skeptics of the latest conclusions countered that the new report was a study of many studies—it could only be as good as the work from which it drew. And even if the conclusions of the meta-analysis are accurate, the average sperm count still leaves most men on the normal side of fertile. Just barely.Yet fertility rates—the number of live births per woman—have drastically declined in the same countries with falling sperm counts. That includes the U.S., where fertility rates hit a record low this year, and where women are no longer bearing enough children to replace the existing population. Women need to average roughly 2.1 children—enough to replace themselves and their partner, with a spare bit to offset kids who don’t survive to reproductive age—to keep a country’s population stable through birth alone. The U.S. is at 1.8 and dependent on continued immigration to keep the population growing. Sociological and economic factors play a role in the changing size of the American family. Fertility rates were above the replacement level until the 2007 recession, then they plunged. And despite a years-long economic recovery and low unemployment, they’re still falling. Pair that with studies showing that nearly one in six couples in the U.S. trying to get pregnant can’t do so over the course of a year of unprotected sex—the medical definition of infertility—and it’s clear that something beyond economic insecurity is preventing Americans from having as many babies as they want. “When I see birth rates going down, I worry as a fertility doctor that men’s sperm counts are declining,” says Harry Fisch, a urologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
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This would seem to be the moment for the medical world to throw everything it can at understanding what is happening to male fertility. Yet researchers on male reproduction are forced to rely on less-than-perfect data because the kind of comprehensive, longitudinal studies that might conclusively tell us what is happening to sperm counts have never been done. The irony is that the medical establishment has been accused—with reason—of ignoring the particular needs of women over the years, yet in reproduction it is men whose problems are poorly studied and often misunderstood. Some experts even wonder whether an unconscious desire to ignore threats to male fertility may be tied up in fears over the future of masculinity itself. “Here is direct evidence that that function of reproduction is failing,” says Michael Eisenberg, a urologist and an associate professor at Stanford University, referring to the latest sperm-level research. “We should try to figure out why that is.”What we do know about declining sperm counts tells us a great deal about not only reproduction but also the overall health of men—and what it tells us isn’t good. Young men may think themselves invincible, but the male reproductive system is a surprisingly temperamental machine. Obesity, inactivity, smoking—your basic poor modern lifestyle choices—can dramatically reduce sperm counts, as can exposure to some environmental toxins. Low sperm counts may presage a premature death, even among men in the prime of their lives who might seem otherwise healthy. “Sperm count decline is the canary in the coal mine,” says Levine. “There is something very wrong in the environment.” Which means there may be something very wrong with men.
Why Johnny Can’t BreedThe study of sperm has always been murky. In 1677, the Dutch draper and amateur scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek collected his semen immediately after having sex with his wife, examined it under a microscope of his own creation and saw millions of wriggling, tiny “animalcules” swimming in the seminal fluid. The Dutchman was the first person to observe human sperm cells, though he insisted that the sperm alone made an embryo that was merely nourished by the female egg and ovaries. Van Leeuwenhoek was simply following the example of classical thinkers like Aristotle, who believed female partners at most provided a fertile bed of soil in which the seed provided by a man could germinate and flower into a child. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century that the true roles of the sperm and the egg were finally sorted out.All those wriggling “swimmers” van Leeuwenhoek saw are what you would see if you magnified the sample of a healthy fertile man. A sperm cell is built for one thing: motion. Its torpedo-like head is a nugget of DNA containing the 23 chromosomes the male partner contributes to his future child, connected to a long tail or flagellum that propels the sperm to the egg, all running on the cellular rocket fuel of fructose, which is in the semen. Most sperm will never come close to an egg—while a fertile man ejaculates 20 million to 300 million sperm per milliliter of semen, only a few dozen might reach their destination, and only one can drill through the egg’s membrane and achieve conception. The chemical makeup of the vagina is actively hostile to sperm, which can only survive because semen contains alkaline substances that offset the acidic environment. That’s the paradox of sperm counts—although one healthy sperm is enough to make a baby, it takes tens of millions of sperm to beat the odds, which means that significant declines in sperm counts will eventually degrade overall male fertility. Notes Swan: “Even a relatively small change in the mean sperm count has a big impact on the percentage of men who will be classified as infertile or subfertile”—meaning a reduced level of fertility that makes it harder to conceive.
The fears about male infertility go beyond the stuff of dry science. “It’s the virility and fertility dilemma,” says Sharon Covington, an infertility therapist in Maryland. “How a man sees himself, and how the world sees him as a man, is often tied to his ability to impregnate a woman.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that the argument over how much sperm counts are declining—if they are declining—has been less a courteous scientific debate than a ferocious battle that has gone on for more than two decades.
This war began in Denmark, in 1990, when Danish pediatric endocrinologist Niels Skakkebaek began looking into male reproductive health. For years, he had been troubled by the rise in testicular cancer, as well as an increase in the number of boys with malformed testes. He thought assessing sperm quality and quantity might give him a clue to what was happening to his patients.
In 1992, Skakkebaek and colleagues reviewed all the published studies of sperm counts from around the world. (Sperm counts are done by tallying the number of sperm cells in one microliter of semen and then multiplying by 10,000 to estimate the total sperm in a milliliter—not dissimilar from the way police try to estimate the size of a large crowd from a geographic sample.) They calculated that the average sperm count in 1940 was about 113 million per milliliter of semen, and that by 1990 it had fallen to 66 million. In addition, they saw a threefold increase in the number of men with a sperm count below 20 million, the point at which infertility becomes a serious risk.Skakkebaek’s 1992 paper raised concern about the ability of the human species to continue reproducing itself, but skeptics immediately attacked, questioning the reliability of the original sperm studies the analysis was based on. The studies drew from very different groups of men of varying age and fertility. (Sperm count tends to decline with age, and men who gave a semen sample in a visit to a fertility clinic can reasonably be expected to have a lower count than, say, healthy men selected as donors for a sperm bank.) Some scientists believe older and less precise techniques for sperm counting may have artificially inflated the sperm levels of our fathers and grandfathers, which would make the drop to current counts appear steeper than it is.That’s why the new meta-analysis is so important. Swan, Levine and their international colleagues carefully sorted through more than 7,500 peer-reviewed papers before narrowing their search to 185 papers involving 43,000 men from around the world. By excluding studies before 1973, they cut out some of the less reliable older measurements, and they discarded any studies of men with known fertility complications or who were smokers, since smoking lowers sperm count. It’s not perfect—no meta-analysis is—but this evidence is the best we currently have, and the conclusions are disturbing. “The community is coming around on this,” says Eisenberg. “There have been some good counterarguments about sperm-level decline, but this paper really puts a lot of those arguments to bed.”Environmental CastrationProving that sperm levels are dropping has been difficult enough, and teasing out the cause is even tougher. Obesity, which has risen dramatically in Western countries while sperm counts have supposedly dropped, is linked to poor semen quality, as is physical inactivity. A 2013 study of American college students found that men who exercised more than 15 hours a week had sperm counts 73 percent higher than men who exercised less than five hours a week. And men who watched 20 or more hours of TV a week had much lower sperm counts than those who watched little to no TV. Stress is also a risk factor, as is alcohol use, which is on an upswing in the U.S., and drug use, which is increasing thanks to the opioid epidemic. Some scientists have theorized that electromagnetic fields from devices like cellphones could degrade semen quality, leading to weak and immobile sperm. Even heat can play a role. We know for certain that high temperatures can kill sperm, which is why the testicles are outside the body, keeping them up to 5.4 degrees cooler. Researchers know that birth rates decline nine months after a heat wave, leading some infertility experts to believe that climate change may actually be a factor in sperm count decline.Age also matters. In a recent study, Laura Dodge of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center looked at thousands of attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF) performed in the Boston area and tried to gauge the impact of both male and female age on success. Female age remained the dominant factor, but male age factored in as well—women under the age of 30 with a male partner between 40 and 42 were significantly less likely to give birth than those whose male partner was between 30 and 35. That dovetails with other research showing that as men age, their sperm suffers increasing numbers of mutations, which in turn can make it slightly more likely that their children will be born with disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Older mothers may get the blame for infertility, but a new study found that new fathers in the U.S. are on average nearly four years older than they were in 1972, while almost 9 percent of new American fathers are over 40, double the percentage from 45 years ago. “We tell men that age is not an issue, but now we know that the male biological clock is real,” says Fisch.So is it simply modern life itself—obesity, inactivity, stress, cellphones, even older parenthood—that’s driving down sperm levels? It’s the beginning of an answer, but not the full one. Tobacco use definitely hurts sperm counts, yet smoking has fallen significantly in the U.S. That’s one reason a growing band of researchers have come to suspect the influence of toxins in the environment—specifically, endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in compounds like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.The theory is straightforward enough: These chemicals mimic the effect of the feminizing hormone estrogen and can interfere with masculinizing hormones like testosterone. The chemicals, which are found in many plastics throughout the environment, may be rewiring the sensitive male reproductive system, eroding sperm quality and quantity and even contributing to the sort of testicular disorders that first alarmed Skakkebaek years ago. The production of sperm is tightly regulated by the body’s hormones, and so any interference with those hormones—say, through exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals—could make itself felt first through damage to sperm quantity or quality. “You could still have sperm, but [levels] might be significantly lower than your father’s,” says Germaine Louis, the director and senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.Most of the evidence for how these chemicals affect sperm comes from animal studies. A 2011 study found that mice who received daily BPA injections had lower sperm counts and testosterone levels than mice who received saline injections. A startling study from 2016 of fish in U.S. wildlife refuges in the Northeast found that 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass studied had eggs growing in their testes—a startling feminization—which researchers linked to endocrine disrupters in the waters. Other studies have shown that phthalates appear to disrupt the masculinization of young lab rats. Animal models aren’t perfect, but as University of Texas toxicologist Andrea Gore notes, “the biology of reproduction is incredibly similar in all mammals. We are all vertebrates, and we have the same reproductive organs and processes that develop similarly with the same hormones.”Scientists can’t expose humans to endocrine disrupters in a controlled experiment, but some recent research has found associations between exposure to BPA and phthalates in the world, and declining sperm counts and male infertility in adults. A 2010 study of Chinese factory workers by De-Kun Li at Kaiser Permanente found that increasing levels of BPA in urine were significantly linked with decreased sperm count and quality, even among men who were exposed to levels of BPA comparable to men in the general American population. Another study from 2014 followed about 500 couples trying to conceive and found that phthalate exposure among men was tied to reduced fertility. These findings are all associations, which means that while exposure to endocrine disrupters is more likely to be found in men suffering from reduced fertility, it doesn’t mean that the chemicals themselves are definitively the cause. But the studies are stacking up. “For some of the endocrine disrupters like phthalates, the basic evidence is strong that they affect reproductive health,” says Louis, who carried out the phthalates study.Even more concerning, but harder to prove, is the damage endocrine disrupters may be doing in utero. As a fetus develops in a mother’s uterus, it is barraged by hormones and other chemicals that sculpt development. That includes the male reproductive system—testicles are formed in the womb, and although sperm levels can be altered in adulthood, they seem to be largely set before a boy is born. That means we could see sperm levels continue to decline for years, as boys who were exposed to endocrine disrupters before birth reach reproductive age and run into problems trying to have children of their own. “This trend hasn’t turned around, and it’s not going to turn around on its own,” says Swan, who has been studying the effects of endocrine disrupters for decades. “We don’t have a lot of time to lose.”The Baby Un-BoomIf this is a crisis, why is the medical establishment still arguing over the accuracy of statistical methods that approximate sperm levels from a variety pack of studies? Trying to figure out what is happening to sperm levels isn’t like trying to create an HIV vaccine. Researchers could follow a cohort of representative men from early adulthood through their reproductive years, taking regular semen samples under the same conditions and tracking lifestyle and environmental factors, including exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Such long-term studies aren’t easy or cheap, but somehow we’ve managed to pull them off for certain illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and cancer. The future of the human race—whether it has one—would seem to qualify as an important topic to explore in depth. “Why are we messing about with this?” says professor Allan Pacey, a male fertility expert at the University of Sheffield. “Let’s just answer the question.”A major, comprehensive study of semen quality has never been funded, however. Doctors are reluctant to even ask men for semen samples, and most men seem reluctant to give one—even though, as Eisenberg wryly notes, “it’s a lot more pleasant for the patient than a blood draw.”
“Male infertility has been ignored for 30 years,” says Christopher Barratt, a professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee in Scotland. “What we understand can be written on a postage stamp.”The average man knows much, much less. Few men could even name the medical specialty that covers male reproductive health—it’s urology—and fewer still have ever seen a urologist, given that there are fewer than 12,000 of them in the U.S., about one-third the number of OB-GYNs in the country. Aside from a few online forums, there are no real support systems for men with infertility issues. Many men lack basic knowledge about risk factors for infertility. A 2016 Canadian study found that men could identify only about 50 percent of the potential risks to sperm production, largely missing out on known threats like obesity and frequent bicycling. “Most men just assume that when they want to have children they’ll be able to,” says Phyllis Zelkowitz, the director of research at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and the lead author on the study. “But that isn’t the case for a certain number of people.”The continued ignorance of male infertility is, in its way, another form of male privilege. Pretending that pregnancy is almost entirely a female responsibility means that women are forced to carry the burden and the blame when it goes wrong, while men, who are just as vital to healthy conception, rarely worry about how their lifestyles impact their own fertility or their possible children. “Women will often be sent to invasive, expensive procedures for fertility before a sperm test is ever done,” says Resolve’s Collura.So men are getting off free while their female partners put themselves through painful and expensive fertility treatments. Well, not exactly. The constant production of new sperm cells makes semen highly sensitive to toxins and disease, making it an ideal surrogate for male health—“like blood pressure,” as Louis puts it—beyond what it might signal for fertility. Poor sperm levels and infertility are a clear sign that men’s health is failing. One 2015 study found that men diagnosed with infertility have a higher risk of developing health issues like heart disease, diabetes and alcohol abuse, while another connected infertility to cancer. “Semen quality isn’t just about a couple getting pregnant,” says Louis. “There is increasing evidence at the population level that men with diminished semen quality die earlier and have more chronic diseases. This is as important to health as any disease state.”That male reproductive health goes mostly ignored in the face of those concerns is a striking example of what Cynthia Daniels, a political scientist at Rutgers University and the author of Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction , calls the “paradox of male privilege.” A society that values men over women would presumably pour money and resources into determining exactly what is happening to sperm counts and reproductive health. But that would risk confirming that men, who are socially conditioned to think of themselves as indestructible, are in fact vulnerable—and vulnerable in that part of themselves most vital to manhood. At a moment when other talismans of masculinity, like the ability to financially support a family, are under assault, acknowledging the risk to reproduction may feel even more threatening to men. “Recognizing the male reproductive health problem unravels the notion of who men are and how they achieve masculinity,” says Daniels. “It seems to be more important to protect our norms of masculinity and traditional gender relations than it is to address the real health needs of men.”
One way to accomplish that goal is to enable men to take responsibility for their reproductive health. That’s what Greg Sommer, the chief scientific officer of Sandstone Diagnostics, is trying to do with Trak, a kit men can use to evaluate their sperm levels. It’s one of several similar do-it-yourself sperm testing services that offer men the chance to assess their own fertility without stepping inside a doctor’s office. That approach is more than a mere convenience because men are significantly less likely to go to the doctor than women, especially men in their prime reproductive years, when their health is otherwise likely to be good.Real, substantive change is needed from the medical and funding communities to address the male infertility crisis. It may be true, as skeptics countered after the publication of Swan and Levine’s meta-analysis, that we’re a long way from declining sperm counts heralding the end of the human race, at least as portrayed in works of pop art like The Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale . Millions of men and women are having children every day—even if an increasing number need artificial help like IVF. Yet more and more countries find themselves unable to raise their fertility rates above the level needed to replace their population, leading one prominent demographer to prophesy that the world has already reached “peak child.”It’s difficult not to wonder and worry about what will come next. “It’s an inconvenient message, but the species is under threat, and that should be a wake-up call to all of us,” says Skakkebaek. “If this doesn’t change in a generation, it is going to be an enormously different society for our grandchildren and their children.”Assuming, of course, they can have them.
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Label salon products to disclose risks.
Imagine that your favorite hair product’s label read, “Warning: may cause infertility,” or listed “formaldehyde,” a cancer-causing embalming fluid, as an ingredient.
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Opinion
Label salon products to disclose risks
By David KleinAugust 17, 2017
Imagine that your favorite hair product’s label read, “Warning: may cause infertility,” or listed “formaldehyde,” a cancer-causing embalming fluid, as an ingredient. Whatever our products contain, you and I remain blissfully ignorant of our exposure and risk because professional cleaning and salon products often do not label their ingredients (although our hair probably looks fabulous).
The Legislature is debating AB1575 and SB258, two bills to improve labeling for salon-grade nail polish, shampoos and hair coloring, cosmetics and skin cleaning products, as well as toothpaste, household cleaning products and automotive industry cleaning products. If you or your loved ones use these products, you should ask your representative to ensure the bills pass. Let me tell you why.
Unlike medications, commercial chemicals undergo little, if any, testing before being introduced into our world. Currently, 9.5 trillion pounds of commercial chemicals pass annually through the United States: enough to dump a new 14-ton sack of industry-grade mystery dust on each American’s pillow each night of each year. Though some may temporarily irritate the skin and lungs, many are endocrine-disrupting chemicals like diethylstilbestrol, or DES, that disrupt our hormone systems and cause disease even in low doses.
The story of DES is one well-studied, notorious example of chemical harms. It was prescribed during the Baby Boom era to prevent pregnancy miscarriage, and is now linked to infertility, obesity and cancer in women who were exposed to this drug in the womb. New data suggest that even the grandchildren of women prescribed DES bear higher disease risks. Chemicals like DES can change the ways that inherited genes are turned on and off, their negative effects to ripple through our genes for generations.
Though industry does respond to public concern, poor transparency remains problematic. Take bisphenol A, or BPA. We know that BPA negatively affects adult fertility and babies’ neurologic development, so “BPA-free” stickers helped companies market their products to safety-aware consumers. While we were looking for stickers, BPA was merely replaced with similar chemicals.
Similarly, the so-called “Toxic Trio” (formaldehyde, toluene, dibutyl phthalate) found in numerous nail polishes prompted companies to claim their product was toxin free. A 2012 report by the California Environmental Protection Agency revealed that these claims were often false.
Some will complain that change is onerous. Surely, products often contain many ingredients, and chemical names read like over-hyphenated alphabet soup. It can be a confusing list. But this is not cause to conceal information. A legal requirement of disclosure will help to ensure the manufacture of safer, faithfully-labeled products.
Moreover, there are solutions. Small pictograms, such as a picture of a pregnant woman with an overlying “X,” will cut through the confusion and convey a message as clear as the modern skull and crossbones. In some cases, that may be appropriate too.
Keep our communities safe and informed. Tell your representative that you vote for transparency.
David Klein is a resident ob-gyn physician at UCSF.
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How to boost Montana coal and wind energy.
Energy policy issues often divide Americans along partisan lines, pitting proponents of coal-fired electrical generation against advocates for alternative sources.
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Gazette opinion: How to boost Montana coal and wind energy
54 min ago
Power transmission
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Transmission lines stretch toward the horizon Thursday as they carry power from Basin Electric's Laramie River Station coal-fired plant outside Wheatland, Wyo. The country's aging energy infrastructure is everyone's problem, but no one's direct responsibility.
Alan Rogers, Casper Star-Tribune
Energy policy issues often divide Americans along partisan lines, pitting proponents of coal-fired electrical generation against advocates for alternative sources. So it’s remarkable that one issue has united Montanans of both major parties, along with lawmakers from Washington state, renewable energy proponents and supporters of the Colstrip power plants.
This diverse group wants the elimination of a transmission fee so high that capacity is being wasted.
This story starts back in 1981 when Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency, built a 1,900 megawatt transmission line between Townsend and Garrison in Western Montana. The Colstrip partners contracted to use 1,700 megawatts of capacity. BPA had a tentative deal with the Western Area Power Administration to use the remaining 200 megawatts of capacity at a higher price than the Colstrip energy would pay.
The 1,900 megawatt line was built, but the WAPA deal fell through. Electricity generated at Colstrip moved over the line under a contract that requires Colstrip partners to cover the costs of maintaining the line.
Wasted capacity
A wind energy development near Forsyth now wants to contract with BPA for 184 megawatts of capacity that isn’t being used, but developers say the extra charge makes the deal unworkable.
If the fee is reduced and the wind energy firm uses the now-unused capacity, its payments will help cover costs now borne by Colstrip partners, including NorthWestern Energy, which serves Montana customers, and Talen Energy, which markets Colstrip electricity outside Montana. Ratepayers in Montana and Washington would benefit because regulated utilities would see lower costs for providing power.
The Montana House approved a resolution sponsored by Rep. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, calling on the BPA to eliminate the Montana intertie rate because:
It adds 40 percent to the cost of traversing the BPA network.
Full subscription of the intertie would reduce the Townsend to Garrison rate paid by the Colstrip partners by as much as 9.5 percent, including costs passed on to Montana consumers.
Elimination of the Montana intertie rate would make new generation facilities in Montana more competitive.
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U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell and Jeffrey A. Merkley made a similar case in a June 12 letter to BPA Administrator Elliott Mainzer in Portland, Oregon. The Democratic senators urged Mainzer to eliminate the Montana Intertie rate and, instead, “charge network rates beginning at Townsend.”
The senators noted that decision would be consistent with BPA’s obligation for “encouraging the widest possible diversified use of electric power at the lowest possible rates to consumers consistent with sound business principles.”
Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, U.S. Sen. Jon Tester and the state’s all-GOP Public Service Commission support nixing the Montana intertie rate.
July 26 decision
Yet last week the BPA announced a draft decision to retain the exorbitant rate that keeps this transmission capacity from being used – and unnecessarily adds to the cost of Colstrip power.
Charging the regular rates of BPA’s 15,000-mile transmission network on that 90-mile stretch through Montana is a no-brainer. It would be a win for BPA, its customers and their customers. More electricity would move through Montana and the unit price of transmission would drop.
The BPA’s final decision, which is expected on July 26, should reflect the business- and consumer-friendly change that state officials, legislators and energy producers want.
The benefits of reducing the fee for using the transmission capacity that has gone unused for nearly 40 years are simply undeniable.
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Gage Skidmore/flickr
All the ways Trump’s budget cuts science funding.
President Trump’s budget blueprint, released Thursday morning, is supposed to lay out the administration priorities, and science is clearly not among them. It deals sweeping cuts to science and health agency budgets, including specific programs.
President Trump’s budget blueprint, released Thursday morning, is supposed to lay out the administration priorities, and science is clearly not among them. It deals sweeping cuts to science and health agency budgets, and, in some cases, targets specific programs championed by the Obama administration.
The administration will release a more detailed budget request later this year, and Congress will ultimately have to approve the federal budget. But in this opening bid, there is not much good news for scientists. “This would be pretty devastating to the American science and technology enterprise,” said Matt Hourihan, director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s R&D; Budget and Policy Program.
The National Institutes of Health, for example, gets a budget cut of 18 percent to $25.9 billion. The NIH funds much of the disease research at universities and hospitals and carries out its own research programs.
The blueprint calls for a “major reorganization” of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers. One cancer researcher told Nature they were especially worried about funding for multi-year epidemiology studies at the NIH’s cancer institute, where even short interruptions can hinder a study. And in keeping with the cuts to diplomacy in the overall budget, the one center named for complete elimination is the Fogarty International Center, whose mission is global health.
How the budget will affect the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is less clear. The blueprint asks to reform the CDC through a $500 million block-grant program, that will allow each state to decide how best to use the money. Notably, perhaps, given that epidemics are international in nature, it does not mention anything about funding the CDC’s global work.
In the Department of Energy, nuclear weapons spending gets a boost to the detriment of renewable energy. The budget would eliminate Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which has given out $1.5 billion to 580 high-risk, high-reward projects in renewable energy and efficiency since 2009. Loan programs for clean energy projects and fuel-efficient cars are also on the chopping block.
In addition, the blueprint cuts $900 million from the Office of Science, which runs ten of the DOE’s seventeen national laboratories. The laboratories carry out a wide range of research, from sequencing for the original Human Genome Project to current fusion energy research.
The Environmental Protection Agency is, unsurprisingly given everything Trump said during the campaign, the biggest target. The blueprint lays out the EPA’s budget as $5.7 billion, effectively a 31 percent cut. It will eliminate the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s flagship policy for lowering carbon emissions.
But that’s not all. The budget eliminates a full 50 programs the administration deems “lower priority and poorly performing,” including Energy Star (which sets standards for energy-efficient household appliances) and the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (which addresses chemicals like BPA). The Superfund program will get 30 percent less funding for cleanup of hazardous waste sites.
Earth science will also lose major funding resources from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. The plan eliminates $250 million in funding for NOAA, which would cut grants supporting coastal and ocean research. It also cuts $102 million from NASA’s Earth science program and ends four missions that would have observed the Earth from space: PACE, OCO-3, DSCOVR Earth-viewing instruments, and CLARREO Pathfinder.
The Trump administration wants NASA to refocus on space exploration, but first, it wants to kill the Asteroid Redirect Mission, where astronauts would have plucked a rock from space and tugged it into lunar orbit. The mission has never been particularly popular, though the Obama administration sold it as a stepping stone to Mars. What the budget does endorse are the Orion crew vehicle and Space Launch System, which are supposed to eventually take astronauts into Mars and deep space. It also endorses a flyby mission to Europa and a Mars rover. Overall NASA only gets a 0.8 percent budget decrease but it comes with a massive reallocation of resources.
The National Science Foundation, which gives $7 billion a year in grants to universities and research institutes, is not specifically mentioned in the budget. Unspecified “other agencies” are in line for a 9.8 percent budget cut according to the blueprint.
In Trump’s overall budget, defense spending is the bigger winner with an increase of $52 billion. The blueprint does not mention funding for military science research programs, such as DARPA. It’s too soon to say whether that might be the one area where science gets a boost.
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White House
25 smears, hoaxes, grifts and whoppers on climate and the environment in the Obama era.
Environmental bloopers from the past 8 years, including some from Obama himself. (Yes, Inhofe's snowball toss made the cut).
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25 smears, hoaxes, grifts and whoppers on climate and the environment in the Obama era.
The White House
Environmental bloopers from the past 8 years, including some from Obama himself. (Yes, Inhofe's snowball toss made the cut)
January 7, 2016
By Peter Dykstra
EHN
Follow @pdykstra
As the curtain comes down on Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, most Americans seemed convinced of one of two things: We’re either about to Make America Great Again®, or we’re about to hurtle into an uncertain epoch that I like to call the Idiocene.
But before we turn the page on this administration let’s take a look back at the tall tales, regrettable pronouncements, farces and scams on climate and the environment during the Obama years. Anti-regulatory zealots led the pack, but President Obama contributed a few of his own – starting on his first full day in office:
After promising transparency, President Obama's Administration was called "one of the most secretive." (Credit: Ash Carter)
1) January 2009: The most transparent administration? Not quite.
A day after his inauguration, President Obama signed a memorandum promising: “the most transparent administration in history.”
By May 2016, a different verdict came in. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan called it “one of the most secretive.” In August 2015, 52 journalism organizations, including the Society of Environmental Journalists, sent an appeal to the White House, asking for an end to restrictions on government employees’ contact with reporters.
2) October 2009: Global warming stops (except it totally doesn’t)
Scientists begin asking questions about why the pace of rising temperatures seems to be defying projections and slowing. Despite the emergence of serious, credible reasons for this – notably that the oceans are working overtime to absorb excess heat – climate deniers have a field day with cherry-picked data.
Even as daily, monthly, and annual warmth records continue to be broken, there’s been “no global warming at all” for nearly two decades in Deniertown.
In a November 2009 press release, the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce declares the “War On Coal” is underway.
3) November 2009: War is declared, a slogan is born
In a press release, the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce declares the “War On Coal” is underway.
4) November 2009: Russian hack (no, the other one)
Hackers, believed to be Russian-based, steal thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Climate deniers spin a few poorly worded correspondences between scientists into a vast conspiracy to fake climate research.
The faux scandal upends coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit, the scientists are cleared of any wrongdoing by multiple investigations, and the hackers are never caught. But their work foreshadows the 2016 election hack.
5) January 2010: Moderate Republicans join Endangered Species List
The Citizens United decision breaches the dam on corporate cash. The high court votes 5-4 to fundamentally reshape the already-cockeyed way election campaigns are financed, offering cover to corporations and super-PACs to target undesirable candidates for defeat.
“Moderate” Republicans are virtually driven into extinction, and the few who acknowledge climate change have a change of heart.
6) March 2010: Fake fishing news sends real readers reeling
An ESPN.com outdoors columnist launches a viral hoax, suggesting that Obama is planning to outlaw all recreational fishing. Within days, chronic Obama critics—from Fox News and the Daily Caller to columnist Michelle Malkin, RedState.com and GatewayPundit.com—dutifully spread the word about “Obama’s latest assault on freedom.” Except not a word of it is remotely true.
7) April 2010: Obama’s oil comment gaffe
18 days before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Obama says "Oil rigs today don't generally cause spills."
8) May 2010: Limbaugh gets to the bottom of Deepwater Horizon
Rush Limbaugh says “environmental wackos” staged Deepwater Horizon as a fundraising scheme.
9) May 2010: Anti-vax doctor defrocked
The UK’s General Medical Council strips Dr. Andrew Wakefield of his license to practice. He authored the 1998 paper linking vaccines to autism. The paper was later retracted by The Lancet and declared “utterly false.”
10) February 2011: The Maine governor doesn’t understand BPA
Maine Gov. Paul LePage, possibly the only politician too dumb for the Trump Administration, declares that BPA’s worst-case scenario would be women with beards.
11) September 2011: Solyndra slips, solar scandal soars
Solyndra fails. The solar company stranded investors and bailed on a half-billion dollar Energy Department loan amid evidence that Obama Administration cronies stood to benefit. But solar energy critics vault a relatively minor scandal into a renewables Benghazi – overlooking the generally successful record of DOE’s startup loans as well as the much larger handouts given to fossil fuel companies.
12) September 2011: The Donald picks a wind fight. Fore!
Donald Trump sends the first of 16 angry, obsessive letters or emails to Scotland’s First Minister about the proposed windfarm near his golf resort. Sad!!
13) May 2012: Heartless Heartland campaign
An electronic billboard on a Chicago freeway heralds the start of a campaign by the Heartland Institute to brand climate-change advocates as cold-blooded serial killers. The first features the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. It draws such a backlash that the billboards featuring climate advocates Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden (really) never get a full airing. Heartland is further tarnished by revelations that it solicited fossil fuel money to pursue its climate denial agenda.
Ric Lander/flickr
14) January 2013: Torquemada-in-Chief
Lamar Smith (Credit: NASA)
Lamar Smith becomes Chair of House Science Committee, and eventually the Torquemada-in-Chief of government climate scientists. Rep. Smith’s committee room becomes an inquisition chamber for government climate scientists and their agency bosses.
15) July 2013: Denial turns to defamation
A blogger for the Competitive Enterprise Institute likens Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann to Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach convicted of serial child molestation. Mann continues to pursue defamation litigation.
16) December 2013: Dirty energy or no energy
Master distractionist Bjorn Lomborg helps launch pro-coal “energy poverty” meme. Coal giant Peabody Energy launches a full-fledged PR sales pitch under the banner “Advanced Energy for Life,” and others scramble to re-brand black coal as the White Hat in a Green World.
17) January 2014: Rush nails it. Again.
As record cold grips much of the U.S., Rush Limbaugh and others accuse meteorologists of inventing the term “polar vortex” in an attempt to hide Mother Nature’s harsh rebuke of climate science. Cooler heads like Al Roker point out that “polar vortex” has been discussed in meteorology texts since at least the 1950’s.
18) February 2014: Energy giant CEO gets all NIMBY
ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson joins a lawsuit against a fracking project near his home. He quits the case a few months later after harsh accusations that he’s a NIMBYllionaire.
19) April 2014: Meet the Bundys
Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy leads an armed standoff against BLM agents. Bundy has refused to pay BLM grazing fees since 1993. In 2016, his sons lead an armed takeover at a National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. They’ve vowed to do it again.
20) April 2014: A disaster in Flint
The struggling city of Flint switches its water source. Reports of discolored water, foul smell and taste, and high bacteria and lead levels go ignored for more than a year. The local, state and federal governments declare a state of emergency nineteen months later.
21) February 2015: An exposed Willie
Documents obtained by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center show climate researcher Willie Soon took more than a million dollars in funding from fossil fuel interests. He promised "deliverables" to his benefactors, and generated studies that cast doubt on human-caused climate change.
22) February 2015: Inhofe’s (cold) curveball
Senator and alpha-male among deniers Jim Inhofe throws a snowball at the Senate President’s podium, forever proving climate change is a hoax.
23) April 2015: Pilgrimage gets no press
Climate deniers stage a pilgrimage to Rome to “educate” Pope Francis on his “unholy alliance with the UN’s climate agenda” and to suggest that Jesus would have served the poor by burning more coal. They are not granted an audience. Their press conference didn’t really get one, either.
24) September 2015: Exxon ignores itself
Investigations by InsideClimate News and The Los Angeles Times reveal that Exxon’s scientists had confirmed the dangers of climate change decades ago, while the company took virtually no action to curb it and continued to fund climate-denying scientists and groups.
25) December 2015: Giants join forces
Chemical giants Dow and DuPont announce a $130 billion merger. The deal, along with the proposed merger of two other chemical giants, Bayer and Monsanto, is still pending.
Next week we’ll look back at 25 signs of hope from the Obama era.
EHN welcomes republication of our stories, but we require that publications include the author's name and EHN at the top of the piece, along with a link back to EHN's version.
For questions or feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Jason Karn/flickr
Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: Oceans poisoned by plastic.
As our disposable culture roars along, humans are transforming the ocean into a trash-strewn, cancerous stew. This is not just gross. It’s an existential threat.
Here in this fishing village, on the island of Java, the surf teems with kaleidoscopic color. Each wave is littered with garish bibs and bobs.
The water is speckled with synthetic hues: Coca-Cola red, day-glo green and every other color in the crayon box. There are monochromes as well: buoyant white blobs that, at a distance, look like 1,000 invading jellyfish.
It’s all plastic trash, of course.
Here floats the detritus of 21st-century consumption: soda bottles, Pampers and, since this is Indonesia, lots of instant noodle wrappers.
Those jellyfish? Plastic shopping bags. You can go five kilometers into the sea, the village fishermen say, and never stop seeing those lousy plastic bags.
“It’s infuriating,” says Alec, a 39-year-old mussel catcher. He’s hunched over his boat’s outboard motor with a wrench, face streaked with motor oil. The engine is all gunked up with plastic.
“This happens almost every day,” he says. “We can barely work. No matter where you go, the sea is covered in plastic.”
Like so many other coastal villages around the world, plastic junk has brought ruin to this place. Called Muara Angke, it’s a settlement in the shadow of Jakarta, a megacity generating mountains of trash each day.
These shores were once among the world’s most coveted. For more than a millennium, waves of outsiders — from Hindu conquerors to rapacious Dutch colonists — lusted after the paradisiacal beauty of Java. But today, any seafarer arriving on this beach will find a saltwater garbage dump.
Credit:
Kuang Keng Kuek Ser / PRI
How terrifying. Not just for this village but for every human on the planet.
Westerners too often regard pollution in Asia as a far-flung curiosity — a tragedy to be pitied from a safe distance.
But when someone throws a dirty plastic spoon into the Java Sea, it doesn’t just float in place. Currents can carry it around the world and back in just 25 years.
All the while, it’s disintegrating into toxic crumbs. The ocean and its creatures are now awash in chemicals oozed by plastic — and it’s seeping into human bodies from Bali to Boston.
So ignore the floating spoon at your own peril. Its molecules, hiding in a bite of salmon, may someday swim through your bloodstream.
“We’re all infected with plastic,” says Seattle-based oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. “Molecules from some kid’s plastic bottle, dropped into the ocean in Asia, are winding up in the food Americans eat.”
Ebbesmeyer is best known for coining the phrase “gyres” — those massive whirlpools of trash swirling in the ocean. Five vortexes of filth now cover a whopping one-quarter of the planet’s surface. They get bigger every year.
As our disposable culture roars along, humans are transforming the ocean into a trash-strewn, cancerous stew. At this rate, by 2050, the seas will actually contain more plastic than fish.
This is not just gross. It’s an existential threat. All that seaborne plastic leaks chemicals that, when ingested, can weaken human sperm, potentially threatening our ability to reproduce.
“This is death by a million cuts,” Ebbesmeyer says. “It makes global warming look like child’s play.”
No country is immune. But the island of Java — a place with too many people and too few garbage trucks — just happens to be an excellent place to watch this crisis in motion.
Because if countries like Indonesia can’t turn off the spigot of plastic trash then, well, we’re all screwed.
*****
One of the countless luxuries Westerners enjoy is the illusion that plastic just vanishes.
It doesn’t. The lid to the Starbucks cappuccino you bought in 2007 is out there somewhere. So is every toothbrush you used in high school. So is every plastic water bottle you finished off in 45 seconds — and then tossed into a black bag that was also made from plastic.
Do you recycle? Great. So perhaps your sophomore-year toothbrush was transformed into a toy in Taiwan or a Turkish kid’s sippy cup.
But this probably didn’t happen. Less than 10 percent of America’s plastic is recycled — and much of the plastic placed in recycling bins actually ends up in a landfill.
But we’ll stay optimistic. Assume your toothbrush evaded the local dump. Odds are very high that it wound up in China, the primary recycler of America’s plastic waste. There, it may have been reincarnated as a drinking straw in Shanghai.
PET recycling China
Piles of plastic bottles are seen at Asia's largest PET plastic recycling factory, INCOM Resources Recovery in Beijing, on May 7, 2013. According to government figures, reported in local media, about 4.67 million tons of recyclable waste was collected in Beijing in 2010. In the same year, 6.35 million tons of trash ended up in landfill in the city.
Credit:
Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
Still, at some point, that straw was thrown away — and less than half of China’s trash ends up in landfills.
A lot of it actually ends up in the ocean.
Imagine a globe with a circle drawn around China and Southeast Asia. More than half of the plastic pouring into the ocean comes from within this circle, according to extensive research published in the journal Science.
Herein lie five big offenders: Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Add Sri Lanka, to the west, and you’ve got the top six plastic polluters on Earth.
What do all of these places have in common? Long shorelines. Populations that have boomed, and economies that have boomed, too. At least enough to turn millions of farmers, once nurtured solely from the land, into folks who can afford Pepsi and mobile phones.
When it comes to plastic consumption, people living in Asia are nowhere near as gluttonous as Americans, who throw out more than 45,000 plastic bottles per minute.
But in America (as in much of the West) waste chucked into a bin tends to end up in a mountainous dump, not the sea. Of all the plastic spewed into the ocean, the US contributes 1 percent. China is responsible for one-third.
So that Shanghai drinking straw, created from the polypropylene essence of your old toothbrush, is quite possibly bobbing in the Pacific.
Let’s hope it’s not gagging some poor tuna.
Dead fish farm
A child examines dead farmed fish floating in Lake Maninjau, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, on Feb. 20, 2016. Fishery officials said up to 30 tons of farmed fish died due to high winds on the lake.
Credit:
Iggoy el Fitra/Antara Foto via Reuters
*****
Plastic is so omnipresent that it’s easy to forget what it actually is.
Plastic is mostly made from crude oil. This black goop, hundreds of millions of years in the making, is first sucked from the ground. Then it’s refined, blasted in furnaces and mixed with additives
The resulting material — plastic — can be molded into everything from spaceship parts to Mardi Gras beads.
Plastic is cheap and strong. It’s so durable, in fact, that it never really dies. A plastic soda bottle in the ocean may retain its shape for 400 years but, even after that, it breaks apart and lives on as poisonous confetti.
Just 100 years ago, everyday people barely used plastic. Now, thanks to multinational conglomerates, it’s the lifeblood of a disposable consumer culture spanning the globe. Plastic is enmeshed in the lives of billionaires and peasants alike.
But when it’s time to toss it away, a wealth divide emerges.
In America — or any place with a well-functioning waste disposal system — garbage trucks whisk away junk at least once a week.
At that point, plastic bottles, spoons and wrappers seem to disappear forever. But there are 3.5 billion people on Earth who know better.
No agency, public or private, comes to collect the plastic junk thrown out by roughly half of humanity. It often piles up at their feet.
*****
Aena, a tween girl from Muara Angke, is one of these people.
Her little Javanese village is a maze of houses assembled from tin sheeting and cheap plywood, some of it salvaged from the beach. The air smells of sea salt, mussels and rotting vegetables.
This settlement is drowning in plastic trash. “Trash bins? We don’t have many of those,” says Aena, 12, wearing flip-flops and Doraemon pajamas. “The only place to throw trash is on the ground or in the sea.”
Aena, 12, in her village (Muara Angke) by Jakarta. Shoreline is smothered by plastic filth. This is what your backyard can look like if you're one of the 3.5 billion humans who don't receive trash pick-up services. #Indonesia
A photo posted by @bkkapologist on Oct 3, 2016 at 12:33am PDT
Sometimes, village grandmas will rake all that plastic into a pile and set it aflame. It’s mostly crude oil, after all, so it lights up quick.
But trying to burn away all the garbage is almost futile. In this village, plastic junk litters every footpath and every patch of sand. When Aena and her friends scamper around the beach, you hear plastic crunching under little feet.
Much of this mess is churned out by Western multinationals: Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, Nestle and Coca-Cola. Some of the beach rubbish bears brand names, like Pantene or Cerelac, that would look familiar to a Wal-Mart shopper.
But on this side of the world, there are fewer jumbo-sized plastic containers. In Southeast Asia, Western corporations sell products in little packets — cheap portions that the poor can afford. They call the appeal of these mini-portions “masstige”: prestige for the masses.
That’s great for Aena. She may live in a shack made of scavenged planks. But she can wash her shoulder-length hair with “ICE COOL MENTHOL” shampoo made by Unilever. One small dollop sells for less than 10 cents.
It’s not so great for the sea. From Java to Vietnam, the waves glitter with thousands of little plastic packets. Once used, they’re worthless and practically impossible to recycle.
Aena says that, if she could wish away all this garbage, she would. “But honestly, we don’t think about it much. It’s looked like this my entire life,” she says. “Like our whole village is a trash bin.”
A few of Aena’s friends, gathered near the shore, giggle in agreement. One drains the last drop of sweet tea out of a plastic bottle and then chucks it over her shoulder. And why not? Littering has lost any sense of taboo. Even if she placed it in a trash bag, no one would come to haul it away.
*****
From Brazil to Vietnam, countless villages like this dot the world’s shorelines. If their inhabitants were the only people dumping plastic into the sea, our oceans would be in far better shape.
Unfortunately, the problem runs much deeper — and the island of Java helps explain why.
Java is one of the world’s most densely peopled islands: 141 million are squeezed onto a patch of land smaller than Louisiana. Many live by the shore. But many more live further inland in cities built up beside rivers.
In the latter half of the 20th century, when Asia went industrial, this island’s population skyrocketed. But Indonesia’s government — a young and quasi-dysfunctional democracy — has not kept up. The country offers regular trash services to only about half of its citizens.
So many families, deprived of dumpsters and garbage trucks, treat the local river as a trash chute.
Tossing trash into waterways is a fairly common practice from Latin America to the Indian sub-continent. River currents act as a conveyer belt, sweeping junk over the horizon and out of sight.
But these days, in Java, rivers can grow so clogged with trash that the water is barely visible.
Take the Cikapundung River. For millennia, the river has bathed and nourished the people of Java. Its coffee-colored water snakes around volcanoes before emptying into the Java Sea.
Now, on a bad day, it is an undulating ribbon of wet garbage. And the rest of Java’s dozen or so rivers aren’t faring much better.
Ciliwung River trash 2014
A volunteer clears rubbish from the Ciliwung River in the Jatinegara district of Jakarta, on Dec. 3, 2014. More than 1,000 soldiers and volunteers cleared 80 tons of garbage after flooding hit parts of the capital.
Credit:
Beawiharta/Reuters
In recent years, these rivers have suffered the equivalent of coronary ruptures. Like blood clots, all that junk can block riverine arteries until — SPLOOSH! — the water gushes on shore.
These man-made floods send soggy styrofoam washing into people’s living rooms. This isn’t merely disgusting. Turning neighborhoods into sewers is potentially deadly. Water-borne infections prey on children and grandparents. And disease, carried by mosquitoes and panicked rats, can prove fatal.
*****
Late last year, Java’s rivers were so plugged up that the government proclaimed a garbage “state of emergency.”
It was a rallying cry for cities to crack down on littering — often in the form of heavy fines totaling around $40 per violation. For the many Indonesians who eke by on $2 per day, that’s a life-ruining sum.
“Before, when we were caught, the cops would just give you a lecture. Or maybe make you do six push-ups,” says Agus Ahmad, 50, the ex-headman of a district in Bandung. The city of roughly 2.5 million is infamous for its polluted waterways.
“Now people are more afraid to throw plastic in the river,” Agus says. “Or at least they’re afraid to get caught.”
Ingrained habits explain part of Indonesia’s trash epidemic, says Yayat Supriatna, an urban planning scholar who has advised the government. “People don’t understand how dangerous plastic can be.”
But so far, he says, the government’s strategy is emphasizing scare tactics over actually hauling away more junk. Only about 40 percent of Javanese homes get “good trash service,” he says, and the population never stops growing.
“What’s the point of fining people? You’re punishing them but you’re not holding up your end of the deal by picking up their trash,” Yayat says. “That’s an injustice.”
So people continue to rebel.
“Adults still throw stuff in the river. They’re just doing it at night,” says Muhammad Randika, an 11-year-old in Bandung. His little neighborhood is called Braga, a labyrinth of stone pathways designed by Dutch colonists.
He lives above a soupy canal. For Muhammad and his pals, this fetid tributary doubles as a swimming hole. They have come to know it as a place where grown-ups try to make stuff disappear: bags stuffed with diapers, intestines from sacrificed cows, even homicide victims.
“Not that long ago, we swam across a floating dead man with a slashed throat,” says Muhammad, flanked by a gaggle of boys in flip-flops. “His face was as white as yours.”
The throng of kids nod along. “That won’t stop us from swimming here though,” Muhammad says. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
Jakarta trash canal
A man collects plastic for recycling from a polluted river in a Jakarta slum, Oct. 1, 2010.
Credit:
Beawiharta/Reuters
*****
“Have you checked your son’s sperm count lately?”
That’s how Ebbesmeyer, the oceanographer, will sometimes greet audience members who come to hear his lectures on ocean debris.
“If you want to see how fast you can stop a conversation, try talking about sperm counts,” he says. “That’ll do it.”
Awkward, perhaps, but not nearly as unpleasant as the fall of humanity.
Studies indicate that, in the last 50 to 70 years, human sperm has grown less potent. One of the more comprehensive studies, conducted in France, shows sperm counts plummeting by 30 percent in less than two decades — and it’s continuing to drop.
Why is this happening? Scientists aren’t sure. Potential causes range from pollution to obesity to drinking from aluminum cans. But the fact that sperm counts are falling so fast, according to leading fertility researcher Richard Sharpe, suggests the causes “must be lifestyle and environmental.”
Mounting evidence suggests the culprit could be estrogen. Not the naturally occurring hormone, but its evil cousins — chemicals in consumer goods that mimic estrogen’s effects.
There are roughly 5,000 of these chemicals lurking in our everyday products. Plastic is most often their Trojan horse. In fact, research shows “almost all” plastics ooze estrogen imitators.
*****
The most notorious of these estrogen imitators is Bisphenol A, or BPA.
This substance is already on the radar for many consumers, who seek out BPA-free plastics. But BPA (and BPS, its equally worrisome sibling) is almost impossible to avoid. It’s in everything from canned goods to Tupperware.
You probably have traces of this stuff in your blood. More than 90 percent of Americans do. And you don’t want more than a trace.
A large body of experts, after reviewing hundreds of studies, declared that the amount of BPA already found in “the typical human living in a developed country” could potentially bring on maladies from weak sperm to cancer.
But don’t worry, says the $374 billion plastics industry. Its lobbyists and sponsored studies contend that small amounts of BPA won’t hurt humans. Corporate advocacy groups, such as Facts About BPA, concede that the substance is “weakly estrogenic” but say it is harmlessly peed out by consumers.
Indeed, the World Health Organization notes the “potential toxic and hormonal properties of BPA” but notes no adverse effects from small doses.
For now, the FDA, which has relied in part on industry-funded studies, is on the manufacturers’ side.
Let’s hope they’re right. Because just look at what this stuff can do to animals.
It can reverse a rat’s gender and alter its genitals. It causes pregnant monkeys to birth deformed babies.
It can even lurk in an animal’s cells to sabotage future generations.
A fish tainted with BPA may have babies with no problems. But its children — and even grandchildren — will become less fertile. According to a University of Missouri study, the chemical could have similar “adverse reproductive effects” on humans.
A biological scientist and well-known BPA critic named Frederick vom Saal, speaking to Mother Jones magazine, puts it succinctly: “A poison kills you. A chemical like BPA reprograms your cells and ends up causing a disease in your grandchild that kills him.”
Just as BPA swims around in our blood, it’s saturating our plastic-strewn seas. When researchers took seawater samples from 200 sites across the US and Asia, they found “significant” levels of BPA in every single one.
All this research has brought Ebbesmeyer, an elder statesman of sea pollution research, to a grim conclusion.
Plastics in the ocean, he says, may threaten existence as we know it.
“Mother Nature is getting rid of us by our own sword,” he says. “Of all the potential nastiness out there, humanity’s inability to reproduce is at the top. But no one wants to talk about it.”
In Ebbesmeyer’s view, this end-of-days scenario could outpace the ravages of climate change. To hear him tell it, our extinction could look like a mash-up between “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Children of Men,” the 2006 thriller in which infertility plunges the world into chaos.
“Humanity is pretty good at avoiding the important questions,” Ebbesmeyer says. “I think the evidence here is pretty conclusive.”
*****
Perhaps this extinction-by-estrogen scenario is overly apocalyptic.
In the meantime, this is what we know for sure.
Humans are disgorging 8 million tons of plastic into the sea each year. Before we know it, those whirlpools of junk in the ocean could soon cover half the planet’s surface.
This junk is killing off millions of creatures. Plastic-infected fish are turning up on our dinner plates. In some parts of the sea, there’s six times more plastic in the water than plankton.
This nightmare begs a number of questions. Among them:
Can humans clean up all this mess?
There are 5.2 trillion bits of plastic in the sea, according to the 5 Gyres Institute.
That’s 52 times the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way.
The answer is probably no.
Can we at least stop leaking plastic into the sea?
Perhaps. But it’ll be expensive.
In the leakiest plastic-pollution zone on the planet — China plus Southeast Asia — waste disposal systems are underfunded, opaque and often corrupt, according to the non-profit Ocean Conservancy.
The group has tried to calculate the cost of overhauling this region’s waste systems to keep plastic out of the sea.
Their figure: $4.5 billion per year, sustained throughout a decade.
That’s a lot, sure, but it’s not an inconceivably high sum. The US hands that much money to the militaries of Egypt and Israel each year — all in the name of protecting American interests.
But at the moment, overhauling Asia’s trash crisis is an environmentalist fantasy. There’s no indication such an effort will be funded by anyone — not countries in Asia, nor the United Nations, nor billionaire donors.
Counting on the United States government to lead the fight against this scourge seems particularly futile. The White House, under incoming President Donald Trump, won’t even concede that climate change is a massive threat. The odds of a fringe issue like plastic pollution appearing on his agenda appear close to nil.
There are flickers of hope, however. China has banned the thinnest plastic bags, which are difficult to recycle and prone to tangle up with just about anything floating by. So has a busy district in Manila, the Philippines capital.
Yangtze river garbage
Workers clear floating plants and garbage off the surface of the Yangtze River in Chongqing municipality, China, July 22, 2015.
Credit:
China Daily via Reuters
In Jakarta, the local government is deploying 4,000 people — paid $60 per week — to dredge plastic junk out of rivers before its hits the ocean. Locally, this endeavor is enormously popular.
But even if this approach were replicated from Lagos to Buenos Aires, armies of trash scroungers can’t save the seas. Any trash that plops into a river is likely to reach the ocean. Cities and towns generate far too much pollution for people to collect by hand.
What are plastics corporations doing to help?
Not enough. Especially in countries such as Indonesia, where regulatory agencies are comparatively weak.
“The corporations may offer a bit of charity here and there,” Yayat says. “But they don’t really help. They’ll say the environment is the government’s responsibility.”
Even the US won’t rein in its plastics industry. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, lobbyists are working overtime to keep plastics “unregulated or under-regulated.”
This scientists’ union also accuses the American Chemistry Council, a powerful pro-plastic trade association, of “following a pattern modeled by the tobacco industry: deny the science, bring in its own experts to counter the evidence” and pressure lawmakers to maintain the status quo.
Neither of the plastics industry’s top BPA lobbies, Facts About BPA and BPA Coalition, responded to PRI’s questions about the chemical's contamination of the sea.
*****
So, what’s the solution?
“If you produce plastic, it’s assured that it will eventually end up in the sea,” Ebbesmeyer says. “So we have to stop producing plastic.”
This is a fairly radical notion. Even hardcore environmentalists struggle to rid their lives of plastic.
Humans worldwide use roughly one million plastic bags per minute. Americans — among the world’s most unrepentant plastic junkies — toss 2.5 million plastic bottles per hour.
Trash collector Java
A trash collecter drops a plastic bag into a basket on the island of Java.
Credit:
Arfiansyah
Killing off disposable plastics would end our way of life. It would slaughter convenience on the altar of ecology. We’re addicted to plastic. It’s literally in our blood.
Maybe we could revert back to glass. Or we could transition to bio-plastics, made from plants such as corn or soy. But as it stands, bio-plastics are more expensive to produce and amount to a tiny portion of the overall plastics market.
As with global warming, humanity might be too myopic to alter its behavior before the oceans are ruined. But what many Western environmentalists often fail to see is that their domestic efforts — like banning plastic bags in Portland — will never be good enough.
Even if the US federal government embraces the most enlightened anti-plastics policy possible, a fanciful notion at best, that wouldn’t spare the ocean from catastrophe. Any potential solution must be executed globally.
As long as Java and places like it gush tons of plastic into the ocean — all while corporations in Europe and the US profit — our bodies will steadily soak up more and more plastic residue.
Perhaps you are among the wealthy minority of humans who have great control over what you eat for dinner. Fearful of estrogenic chemicals, you can quit eating ocean-caught fish. (You’ll also want to swear off other main contributors of BPA to human blood: canned drinks and chemical-laced paper receipts.)
But even if you succeed, that won’t spare the billions of less fortunate people who rely on fish as a primary protein. Nor will it spare the fish themselves. At this rate, in a few decades, there will be more plastic swishing about the ocean than fish.
The full implications of this crisis remain unknown. Many environmentalists portend doom. Conglomerates tell us not to fret.
As for Ebbesmeyer, he’s betting on disaster.
“These endless shenanigans are driving us toward mass extinction,” he says. “We’re one of the many animals that will become extinct — ironically by our own intelligence.”
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