foodcontact
Does 'sustainability' help the environment or just agriculture's public image?
Big food companies like Walmart want farmers to reduce greenhouse emissions from nitrogen fertilizer. But the best-known program to accomplish this may not be having much effect.
Brent Deppe is taking me on a tour of the farm supply business, called Key Cooperative, that he helps to manage in Grinnell, Iowa. We step though the back door of one warehouse, and our view of the sky is blocked by a gigantic round storage tank, painted white.
"This is the liquid nitrogen tank," Deppe explains. "It's a million-and-a-half gallon tank."
Nitrogen is the essential ingredient for growing corn and most other crops. Farmers around here spread it on their fields by the truckload.
"How much nitrogen goes out of here in a year?" I ask.
Deppe pauses, reluctant to share trade secrets. "Not enough," he eventually says with a smile. "Because I'm in sales."
For the environment, though, the answer is: Way too much.
The problems with nitrogen fertilizer start at its creation, which involves burning lots of fossil fuels. Then, when farmers spread it on their fields, it tends not to stay where it belongs. Rainfall washes some of it into streams and lakes, and bacteria in the soil feed on what's left, releasing a powerful greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide.
There have been lots of attempts to control renegade nitrogen. Most have focused on threats to water and wildlife. Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, for instance, have spent billions of dollars keeping nitrogen (and other forms of fertilizer runoff) out of the Chesapeake Bay.
Reducing nitrogen's contribution to global warming, though, is even more difficult. Philip Robertson, a researcher at Michigan State University who's studied those greenhouse emissions, says that "ultimately, the best predictor of the amount of nitrous oxide emitted to the atmosphere is the rate at which we apply nitrogen." Essentially, the only proven way to cut heat-trapping emissions from nitrogen fertilizer is to use less of it. Most farmers haven't been willing to do this, because it could cut into their profits.
Enter the SUSTAIN program, which some food companies, including Walmart, are touting as a step toward the breaking this stalemate, allowing farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions without reducing their profits. Land O'Lakes, one of the largest agricultural businesses in the country, runs SUSTAIN. It has made a pledge to Walmart to enrolls 20 million acres of farmland in the program, as part of Walmart's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "Land O'Lakes is a company that goes from farmer to consumer," says Matt Carstens, the executive in charge of it. "We have an obligation and an opportunity to do what's right."
I came to Key Cooperative to see what SUSTAIN looks like in practice.
I met Ben Lauden, a farmer who enrolled his acres of corn and soybeans in the program. Since signing up, Lauden has been doing a few things differently. He's applying nitrogen fertilizer several times during the growing season, instead of all at once. That's so the fertilizer arrives when the growing corn plants need it, and less is wasted. He buys "stabilizers" — chemicals that are mixed with nitrogen and keep it from washing away so quickly. Also, data on his fertilizer use goes into a computer program that monitors the weather and predicts how much nitrogen will remain in the soil.
It's all intended to let him use nitrogen more efficiently. But is he actually using less of it? Lauden pauses. "I think you would use less, but I don't — I can't quantify it, I guess," he says.
That's more or less what Michigan State researcher Philip Robertson has observed. The technologies that Key Cooperative is selling to Lauden, "if used properly, should allow the farmer to use less nitrogen fertilizer," Robertson says. But he adds, "whether that actually happens is the $64,000 question, because there are lots of cases where farmers have been sold stabilizers without necessarily recommending a reduction in the rate of fertilizer application."
Even Matt Carstens, who created SUSTAIN and promoted it to food companies and environmental groups, isn't promising that it will reduce the amount of nitrogen released into the environment. He does believe that it will help farmers use it more efficiently, allowing them to grow more corn without using more fertilizer. "There's definitely a trend in the direction of using [nitrogen] more wisely," he says. "But to say that every year we can count on a reduction, that's just not possible."
In fact, there's even some confusion about what SUSTAIN is supposed to accomplish. Brent Deppe, the manager at Key Cooperative, says that the program was introduced to him and to farmers as a way to tell consumers about the steps farmers are taking to protect the environment. "The message wasn't being told," Deppe says. "We're doing a lot of the right things. We just aren't advertising it."
SUSTAIN does not advise farmers to do anything as dramatic as growing different crops. And according to some environmentalists, that's exactly the problem. Careful management of fertilizer "is a good thing to do, but it's not enough," says Matt Liebman, a professor at Iowa State University.
Sarah Carlson, who works for an environmentally minded group called Practical Farmers of Iowa, has confronted Walmart executives about SUSTAIN and its limited goals. "I was like, 'Why are you only focused on nitrogen fertilizer management?" Carlson says. "That makes such little impact on water quality, and such little impact on greenhouse gas reduction."
Carlson has a counter-proposal. It sounds simple: Companies could give farmers a financial incentive to move away from simply growing corn and soybeans, instead adding "small grains" like oats (or rye) to their mix of crops.
That simple move could cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third, much more than anything SUSTAIN is doing, she says. Oats, unlike corn or soybeans, can easily be grown together with a "cover crop" of clover. That clover has an important benefit: It adds nitrogen to the soil the organic way, replacing the need for synthetic nitrogen that's manufactured in energy-intensive factories. (Nitrogen from clover still gets converted into nitrous oxide by soil bacteria, however.) In addition, cover crops add carbon to the soil, which also helps fight climate change.
Many farmers would be happy to do this, Carlson says. They understand the environmental benefits. But right now, those farmers don't have a market for those oats.
"You know, Walmart, you should suggest to your commodity buyers that they buy more small grains [like oats] for feed rations" for animals like pigs," Carlson says. "We have all these pigs in the state; 5 percent of their diet could be oats. We can just sprinkle it in there. It wouldn't be that hard."
There is, however, one crucial obstacle: Relying on oats for your bacon would cost a little more money, and somebody would have to pick up that tab. It could be Walmart — and, in turn, American consumers.
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40 countries are making polluters pay for carbon pollution. Guess who's not.
Most people who have given climate change policy any thought agree that it is important to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. They are a form of harmful waste; those producing the waste should pay for the harms.
40 countries are making polluters pay for carbon pollution. Guess who's not.
This map shows the steady, inexorable spread of carbon pricing.
Updated by David Roberts@drvox Jun 15, 2017, 9:00am EDT
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Most people who have given climate change policy any thought agree that it is important to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. They are a form of harmful waste; those producing the waste should pay for the harms. (There’s plenty of debate over just how central pricing is to a serious climate strategy, but very little debate that it should play some role.)
That policy consensus has been in place for quite a while. It seems the political world is beginning to catch up.
The sustainability think tank Sightline has just updated its map of carbon pricing systems across the world. Things have gotten quite lively. Here’s an animated version:
The size of the bubbles correspond to the amount of carbon covered. New systems are outlined in orange in their first year. (Sightline)
Carbon pricing through 2018
The big recent news is China, of course. In July, its carbon cap-and-trade system — which has been tested in nine provinces for several years — will go national, effectively doubling the world’s priced carbon. (That’s the giant bubble on the map above.) At that point, fully a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions will be priced at one level or another. A quarter!
Action in the past few years has been fast and furious. Sightline’s Kristin Eberhard summarizes:
In 2015, Portugal launched a carbon tax, and South Korea implemented a cap-and-trade program. California expanded its cap-and-trade program, initially launched in 2012, to cover 85 percent of it GHG emissions.
After abolishing its carbon price in 2014, Australia launched a new “safeguard mechanism”—a modified form of cap-and-trade—in 2016. In addition to its carbon tax, which has been in place since 2008, in 2016, British Columbia put a limit and price on pollution from industrial facilities (especially targeting coal-fired power plants and liquefied natural gas facilities). In 2018, BC will expand its carbon tax to cover fugitive emissions and forest slash-pile burning and raise the tax by $5 per year.
The United States-shaped hole in the fight against climate change is increasingly conspicuous. In 2017, Ontario, Canada, launched a cap-and-trade program, and Alberta, Canada, launched a new carbon tax for transportation and heating fuel emissions. Canada’s federalist experiment around carbon pricing paid off: four different provinces are running four different programs, and now the federal government is ready to implement a national price in 2018. But the federal requirements leave plenty of room for each province to tailor its own solution. Mexico will also launch a national carbon price in 2018.
Chile’s carbon tax, in the works since 2014, took effect in 2017. South Africa expected to launch a carbon tax in 2017, but delayed the implementation.
And of course, there’s China. That’s a lot of bubbles, and they’re adding up.
Carbon pricing in the US
As Eberhard notes, Canada is leaving the US in the dust, and Mexico is about to do the same. That leaves the US isolated in North America (not to say the world).
But California is currently working to extend and expand its system to meet its ambitious new goals. The states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) are in the midst of a program review, which could involve boosting its ambition.
And Trump’s evident disdain for climate change has galvanized a range of states to speak up and vow action. At least five states have bills in play that would implement some form of carbon tax or fee. Gov. Terry McAuliffe is talking about a carbon cap in Virginia. Hawaii just passed a law committing to the Paris climate targets. Some 34 states now have climate action plans. (More on states rallying in a subsequent post.)
The point is, while Trump and the GOP have taken the US federal government out of the carbon pricing game (not that it was ever in the game), the policy is still very much alive in the US, buzzing around in states and cities, finally getting some varied real-world testing. Even grid operators and utilities are talking about it.
Carbon pricing in the future
The Paris climate agreement — which Trump intends to pull the US out of, but which 194 countries remain committed to — contains (somewhat miraculously, in Article 6) explicit provision for countries to meet their emission targets (NDCs) by cooperating in cross-border carbon markets, through a common cap-and-trade program or carbon tax.
Almost 100 countries have indicated in their NDCs that they are interested in joining up with an international carbon pricing system as a way to meet their targets. If all those countries actually take steps to price carbon — a huge if, obviously! — the map starts to look quite interesting:
(Sightline)
It is early days yet, and carbon prices remain too low even in places where they exist. But if you squint just right, you can see the fuzzy outlines of a truly global response to climate change beginning to come into focus. That’s why the Paris process was so important.
One other thing about the map above.
It’s notable that three of the biggest remaining blank areas are the US, Russia, and the Middle East. Call it the Axis of Unpriced Carbon. Perhaps, in the 2020 presidential election, the question of whether and how long America intends to remain in that club might finally become a salient political issue.
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EPA just scrubbed even more mentions of climate from its website.
The agency has said it is updating the site to better reflect the Trump administration's priorities.
EPA Just Scrubbed Even More Mentions of Climate from Its Website
The agency has said it is updating the site to better reflect the Trump administration's priorities
By Niina Heikkinen, ClimateWire on May 8, 2017
Credit: Gromit702 Getty Images
U.S. EPA is continuing to quietly alter climate change information from the sub-pages of its website following the agency’s widely criticized decision more than a week ago to remove its main climate page.
EPA has said it is updating the site to better reflect the Trump administration’s priorities, starting with deleting information on President Obama’s Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant emissions. Immediately following this announcement, though, visitors could still see climate change under the “Effects of Air Pollution” in the “Air” section of EPA’s list of “Environmental Topics.”
The agency has now removed climate change from that page entirely. Those seeking information on global warming can find links to an explanation of the removal of the climate change pages by clicking on “Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions,” listed under “Air Pollutants.”
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative also reported Friday that “A Student’s Guide to Global Climate Change,” a children’s educational site that included more than 50 webpages, isn’t accessible while navigating within the EPA website and was not properly archived on the Jan. 19 “snapshot” page meant to show EPA’s site prior to the inauguration.
In a blog post, EDGI, which is working to preserve public environmental data, suggested the omission of the students website from the snapshot page was likely accidental. Still, the page’s disappearance could still get the agency in possible legal trouble under the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act for potentially failing to preserve records correctly.
“It demonstrates the importance of properly documenting and systematically coordinating agency website changes and that errors can be made when agencies do not properly document what changes are made during a rapid overhaul of a large and complex website,” according to EDGI.
Former air regulators and environmental groups slammed EPA’s decision to remove climate change information while it makes changes to the website.
“The information should be available to the public,” Janet McCabe, the former acting assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said in an email. “Teachers use this information to help their students understand trends in science, state/local government officials use the information specific to their regions. Companies looking for resources and help on how to reduce their energy bills use it, it goes on and on.”
She also noted that much of the information on EPA’s website had been there for decades through both Republican and Democratic administrations.
REGULATORS: IGNORING CLIMATE HURTS CLEAN AIR EFFORTS
The Sierra Club is now adding the webpage removal to its scientific integrity complaint against EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Elena Saxonhouse, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club who originally filed the ethics complaint against Pruitt for his comments about the causes of climate change, said EPA had again violated its scientific integrity policy by removing the climate change pages.
“What’s concerning is they are explicitly saying they are looking to make changes to conform with the approach of new leadership. Science can’t be changed because of a political appointment. That’s what alarmed us,” she said.
The environmental group is now asking for more specific action for the administrator and the agency in the amended ethics complaint to EPA’s scientific integrity official.
“At a minimum, Pruitt should correct his statements and restore information online and advise staff that they would be in violation of the scientific integrity policy if they omit facts on climate change,” she said.
Former state and regional air regulators also critiqued EPA for altering the website and noted that failing to focus on climate change would hurt the agency’s “Back to Basics” agenda of focusing on restoring clean air and clean water.
“The change in EPA’s website ... is politically motivated and not based on science, legal authority or common sense,” said Andy Ginsburg, who spoke to E&E; News as a private citizen but is the former air quality administrator at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and planning administrator at the Oregon Department of Energy.
Ginsburg pointed out that strategies to reduce greenhouse gases also reduce conventional pollutants. Controls on burning fossil fuels prevent the emissions of particulate matter, toxic air pollutants and ozone precursors like volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, along with greenhouse gases. Rising temperatures make the impacts of these pollutants worse.
“By not considering these types of interactions, the Trump EPA will necessarily select sub-optimal solutions to air pollution problems that will increase costs in the long run for the regulated community, increase the pollution burden on the public and vulnerable communities, and remove incentives for technological innovation,” Ginsburg said.
John Paul, the former administrator of the Regional Air Pollution Control Agency in Dayton, Ohio, also noted that good energy policies would benefit both air pollution and climate change.
“Utilities have always asked for timeliness and certainty, and a good national energy policy can provide both in an environmentally responsible manner. We need comprehensive energy legislation that maps the future and considers all the important factors—reliability, efficiency, safety, sustainability, sufficiency, and health,” he said in an email.
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US environmentalists move fight from Capitol Hill to the courts.
The battle against US President Donald Trump's rollback of environmental protections is increasingly being fought in the legal arena, with new lawsuits recently launched to stop actions on pesticides and Arctic drilling.
For eight years, environmental advocates in Washington expended their daily efforts lobbying the Obama administration to strengthen environmental protections in the United States. But these days, they're more likely to be found in a courthouse than in the White House.
The first half of April saw the emergence of three new lawsuits against the Trump administration's anti-environmental executive orders. Last week, the Pesticide Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sued the administration for canceling a planned ban on a controversial pesticide linked to brain damage in children, which had been put in place by the Obama administration.
The week before, environmental groups began planning lawsuits against Trump's moves to loosen smog limits, and open Arctic and Atlantic waters for drilling.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 17 US states led by New York filed a legal challenge against Trump's executive order rolling back energy efficiency regulations put in place by Obama. The states say the federal government has a legal duty to regulate carbon emissions to protect the climate.
All of this has taken place since Scott Pruitt, the climate-denying former Oklahoma attorney general Trump put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), took control three months ago.
Before taking over, Pruitt spent years suing the EPA himself, trying to prevent the agency from putting stricter environmental protections in place.
But now the tables have turned: Some of the people who were on the receiving end of Pruitt's lawsuits at Obama's EPA have quit, and have joined environmental groups in suing Pruitt's EPA.
'At war with the American people'
"It was a very dramatic shift," David Doniger, NRDC director of climate and clean air programs, told DW about the EPA's move to undo itself. But this shift has been engineered in a thin layer at the top of agency, he added - without involving career staff.
In the case of the pesticide suit, Pruitt is overruling the EPA's pesticide experts. "He's at war with his own agency," Doniger said. "But much more importantly, he's at war with the American people."
"If you look at opinion polls, the vast majority of American people reject the idea of rolling back air and water pollution controls," Doniger said.
The takeaway from the election should not be that people voted for dirtier air or water and unsafe chemicals, he added.
But Doniger acknowledges that it is not just legal battles US environmental groups want to win. Part of the purpose of the lawsuits is to win in the court of public opinion.
"Every lawsuit, every step we take in the administrative process, is a moment to raise the profile of these issues in the public discussion and to engage people," he said.
Tallying up the actions
Since taking office three months ago, Pruitt and Trump have been busy working to undo a number of Obama-era environmental protections. The greatest unraveling to date came on March 28, when Trump signed an executive order ending the Clean Power Plan meant to implement US emission reductions under its Paris Agreement commitment.
At the same time, he also ended a 2016 moratorium on coal leases on federal lands, along with ending record-keeping of the federal government's carbon emissions and tracking the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions.
Also in March, Trump approved the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project, which would connect Canada's oil sands to refineries in Texas. He has green-lit permitting for the contentious Dakota Access pipeline.
The administration has also begun a process to undo Obama-era emission requirements for motor vehicles manufactured starting in 2022, and roll back Obama's measures to improve car fuel economy to levels consistent with European Union specifications.
Trump rescinded an Obama-era prohibition on lead ammunition on federal lands and waters, and revoked Obama's stream protection rule, which placed stricter restrictions on dumping mining waste into waterways.
Trump's first budget also included deep cuts to US science and environmental agencies, particularly the EPA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In addition to all this, he has ordered a review of the Clean Water Act, the central US tool for dealing with water pollution.
Pesticide test case
The lawsuit attempting to stop Trump from killing the ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin, will be the first test case in a slew of lawsuits being prepared by the environmental groups against Pruitt's EPA.
Initiated by legal advocacy group Earthjustice, the group has already filed seven lawsuits against the Trump administration - but this is the most high-profile and will likely come to court the fastest. The pesticide is most used by Dow Chemical, which markets it under the name Lorsban.
Researchers have linked the insecticide - used on corn, strawberries, wheat, apples, broccoli and on golf courses - with lower IQ, attention deficit disorders and developmental delays.
The US government blocked the chemical for residential use in 2000 due to health concerns, but it was not until 2014 that the Obama administration put into place plans for a full ban on applications for food last year.
The EPA released an assessment in November concluding that current usage of the pesticide presents risks to drinking water and the human diet. But last week Pruitt ignored the findings of his agency and reversed the ban. "We are returning to using sound science in decision-making," he said in a statement.
Doniger says Pruitt's reasoning won't fly in a court of law. "One of the hallmarks of the American legal system is that agencies have to have a compelling record that explains their decisions and backs up the factual propositions with evidence," he says.
"The courts often give a lot of leeway to agencies on scientific matters, but they don't like it when the agencies contradict their own record."
More lawsuits are likely to follow based on the same grounds - that the agency is taking decisions that contradict its own findings.
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Native Americans fight Texas pipeline using 'same model as Standing Rock.'
The Two Rivers camp, protesting the Trans-Pecos pipeline, is the latest sign that the Standing Rock movement is inspiring indigenous-led activism across the US.
The Two Rivers camp, protesting the Trans-Pecos pipeline, is the latest sign that the Standing Rock movement is inspiring indigenous-led activism across the US
Two Rivers camp in Texas.
Two Rivers camp in Texas. Photograph: Courtesy of the Society of Native Nations
Sam Levin in San Francisco
@SamTLevin
Monday 9 January 2017 06.00 EST Last modified on Monday 9 January 2017 06.01 EST
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Indigenous activists have set up camps in the Texas desert to fight a pipeline project there, the latest sign that the Standing Rock “water protector” movement is inspiring Native American-led environmental protests across the US.
The Two Rivers camp, located south of Marfa near the border, has attracted dozens of demonstrators in its first week to protest the Trans-Pecos pipeline, a 148-mile project on track to transport fracked natural gas through the Big Bend region to Mexico.
Citing concerns about damage to the environment and sacred indigenous sites, the camp parallels the high-profile effort to block the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) and is one of multiple Native American land campaigns building on the momentum of the demonstrations in North Dakota.
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“We’re going to follow the same model as Standing Rock,” said Frankie Orona, executive director of the Society of Native Nations and an organizer at the Two Rivers camp. “This is a huge historical moment for environmental issues, for protecting our water, protecting our land, protecting sacred sites and protecting treaties.”
Two Rivers emerged weeks after the Obama administration denied a key permit for the Dakota Access pipeline, a major victory for the Standing Rock tribe and thousands of indigenous and environmental activists who spent months camped in Cannon Ball in hopes of thwarting the $3.7bn oil project.
Though the fight against DAPL is not over – given that Donald Trump is an investor in the company and supporter of the project – the temporary win has energized ongoing indigenous environmental battles and inspired new ones.
The campaign against the Trans-Pecos project, which is also owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, has the closest connections to Standing Rock, with activists adopting similar tactics, including setting up spiritual camps in the region of construction and planning nonviolent “direct actions”.
“Our hope is that we can create a public pressure crisis,” said Lori Glover, a Big Bend Defense Coalition spokeswoman who owns the land in Texas where the camps are expanding. “I hope this helps us stop the pipeline long enough to get the government and Energy Transfer Partners’ attention and push them to do the right thing.”
Vicki Granado, ETP spokeswoman, said the Trans-Pecos pipeline is nearly 90% complete and defended the project in an en email, claiming that “underground pipelines provide the most environmentally safe and the most efficient means to transport natural gas, crude oil or other carbon-based energy products that are critical to Americans’ daily lives, and to our economy”.
Two Rivers camp in Texas during the first week it was set up.
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Two Rivers camp in Texas during the first week it was set up. Photograph: Courtesy of the Society of Native Nations
Standing Rock garnered support from hundreds of indigenous tribes in a collaboration that some said was unprecedented, and Yolanda Blue Horse, a Native American activist in Texas, said she hoped Trans-Pecos would attract a similarly diverse and unified group.
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Reports of intense police brutality and mistreatment in North Dakota have also inspired people to fight back, said Blue Horse, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe.
“What happened up there could very well happen to any of our communities if big money gets involved. That’s a scary thing.”
Some DAPL demonstrators are now on their way to Texas, according to Orona.
Outside of Texas, indigenous activists involved with Standing Rock have also recently turned their attention to environmental battles in a number of states, including Minnesota, Florida, Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming.
Elliott Moffett, a Nez Perce tribe member from Idaho, who has been fighting for the removal of dams to save wild salmon from going extinct, said the international attention on Standing Rock has helped the public better understand the intersection of indigenous rights and environmental activism.
“We’ve been here for thousands of years. We’ve had to deal with sustainability issues,” said Moffett, whose group Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment argues that dams in the Snake river impede tribal treaty rights.
In New Mexico, Native American groups have been fighting for stronger fracking restrictions after an oil field explosion affected a Navajo community. And after indigenous activists protested a proposed oil pipeline, which some had labeled “New Mexico’s DAPL”, the operator withdrew plans.
Lori Goodman, a Navajo activist and treasurer of Diné Citizens Against Ruining Environment, attributed the withdrawal to fears of a North Dakota-style protest.
“Standing Rock has really opened eyes. Now there’s no going back,” she said. “Enough is enough.”
After Standing Rock, some Native American activists said they hoped there would be broader support for protecting indigenous sites, even when there aren’t high-profile oil projects threatening the land.
“We’re still in a very perilous position regarding sacred places,” said Klee Benally, a Diné activist based in Arizona. “There is an awakening for indigenous resistance. It’s about cultural survival.”
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Food packaging is not the enemy of the environment that it is assumed to be.
Far from being the blight that green critics claim it is, food wrappings can in fact be an environmental boon.
Vacuum packs mean meat can stay on shelves for between five and eight days
Dec 17th 2016
ROUGHLY a third of food produced—1.3bn tonnes of the stuff—never makes it from farm to fork, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. In the poor world much of this waste occurs before consumers even set eyes on items. Pests feast on badly stored produce; potholed roads mean victuals rot on slow journeys to market. In the rich world, waste takes different forms: items that never get picked off supermarket shelves; food that is bought but then goes out of date.
Such prodigious waste exacts multiple costs, from hunger to misspent cash. Few producers and processors record accurately what they throw away, and supermarkets resist sharing such information. But some estimates exist: retailers are reckoned to mark down or throw out about 2-4% of meat, for example. Even a tiny reduction in that amount can mean millions of dollars in savings for large chains.
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Waste also damages the environment. The amounts of water, fertiliser, fuel and other resources used to produce never-consumed food are vast. The emissions generated during the process of making wasted food exceeds those of Brazil in total. Squandering meat is particularly damaging: livestock account for more emissions than the world’s vehicle fleet. Consumption of the red stuff is also set to increase by three-quarters by the middle of the century as newly-rich diners in China, India and elsewhere develop a taste for it. The UN wants to halve food waste per person in shops and in households by 2030 under its Sustainable Development Goals.
Help is at hand in the sometimes squishy, see-through shape of packaging. Far from being the blight that green critics claim it is, food wrappings can in fact be an environmental boon. By more than doubling the time that some meat items can stay on shelves, for example, better packaging ensures that precious resources are used more efficiently. Planet and profits both benefit.
Vacuum packaging helps enormously here (even though shoppers tend to prefer their cuts draped behind glass counters, or nestled on slabs of black polystyrene). The plastic packs, which prevent oxidation, mean meat can stay on shelves for between five and eight days, rather than two to four. It also makes it more tender. The equipment to vacuum-pack meat costs a few hundred thousand dollars, and its flimsier nature requires different methods of stacking. British retailers are pioneers when it comes to reducing waste through clever wrappings, says Ron Cotterman of Sealed Air, an American packaging giant that works in more than 160 countries and whose clients include huge chains such as America’s Walmart and Kroger.
J. Sainsbury, a British grocer which also works with Sealed Air, is already benefiting from a new approach. Jane Skelton, its head of packaging, says that in the last financial year the store reduced waste by more than half after moving more beefsteak lines into vacuum packing. Kroger now ensures that cheeses arrive at its deli counters in vacuum-packaged bags ready for slicing; Walmart is searching for better ways to wrap meats.
Packaging works wonders for customers, too. The resealable kind keeps certain dairy products fresher for far longer in customers’ fridges. The practice of packaging a lump of produce in portions allows the growing number of singletons to prepare exactly what they need and freeze the rest. Tesco, a British grocer, now offers chicken in pre-portioned packaging, for example. In 2016 the chain said it aimed to reach a point where no edible food would be binned from its stores by the end of 2017—down from 59,400 tonnes a year now—with a little help from apps that allow charities to collect unwanted items.
Longer-lasting products ought to mean fewer trips to the shops. But according to Liz Goodwin, a food-waste expert at the World Resources Institute, a think-tank, half of the money shoppers save through better-lasting products winds up in retailers’ tills anyway. Aspiring cooks are more likely to buy premium items if they know they will use them before they spoil.
The wages of bin
Vacuum packs and other kinds of wrapping do themselves consume energy and resources in their manufacture. But they make more sense than letting food go to waste. Mark Little, who is in charge of reducing food waste at Tesco, points out that every tonne of waste means the equivalent of 3.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are released without purpose. In contrast, a tonne of packaging causes emissions of 1-2 tonnes.
This fact is insufficiently recognised by many rich-world retailers. Some supermarkets are trying to cut down on packaging because the common perception is that it is wasteful. But cutting the amount of plastic covering food makes no sense if products then spoil faster, says Simon Oxley of Marks and Spencer (another British retailer, which was among the first to start adopting vacuum-packaging a decade ago). The next frontier for the world of packaging, he says, is ensuring that as much of it can be reused as possible. That will be a challenge, however, given the hard-to-recycle layers of plastics that go into most vacuum packs.
The hope is that rich-world adoption of more efficient packaging could encourage supermarkets in places such as China and Brazil, where retail chains are growing apace, to follow suit (even if issues of hygiene and refrigeration are more pressing concerns at the moment). By the middle of the century, when the UN projects the world’s population to be almost 9.7bn people, nutrition needs mean that farms, food processors, shops and homes will need to use resources far more efficiently. Unpack the numbers, and it is clear that wrapping up well will help.
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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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