What lead-tainted Lunchables reveal about the persistent threat of lead exposure.

By Dylan Scott@dylanlscott Updated Apr 11, 2024, 10:05am EDT

Lead keeps showing up where it’s not supposed to be.

In 2024, one of the most potent neurotoxins known to humanity persists all over the world as a public health threat. For the third time in six months, lead contamination in food products has put public health authorities on high alert in the wealthiest nation in the world.

Last fall, contaminated cinnamon applesauce pouches caused dozens of lead poisoning cases across the US, eventually prompting recalls in November. In March, the federal government announced that some ground cinnamon products also contained slightly elevated levels of lead and advised customers not to buy them. Then this week, Consumer Reports urged the USDA to remove Lunchables meal kits from the federal school lunch program — which provides meals to 30 million children nationally — after detecting concerning levels of lead in the products.

The source of the lead found in Lunchables is not yet known, and the federal government hasn’t responded to the advocacy group’s report. But lead in food products continues to cause recurring health scares in the US. While lead might seem like something we left behind in a past era, pollution in other parts of the world and unchecked industry practices continue to put kids — not only in America but all over the globe — at risk.

By the 1990s, nearly every country had eliminated leaded gasoline, once easily the most ubiquitous source of lead pollution when we spewed it into the open air. The US and Europe also instituted more stringent rules for another common source of exposure, lead paint, by greatly restricting or outright banning its use. You can see the improvements in the numbers: From 1978 to 1991, the average level of lead in the blood for Americans younger than 75 dropped by 78 percent.

But lead usage has actually been on the rise worldwide, even in the US. The proliferation of lead-acid batteries globally and less stringent rules in the developing world for everything from cookware to spices has allowed lead consumption to grow despite its known health risks.

Lead is linked to a wide range of neurological and development problems, and exposure is especially dangerous for children. Research has found kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood experience a range of effects, from speech and hearing problems to learning and behavioral issues. They develop more slowly, physically and mentally.

And it remains an especially serious plight for poorer countries: A 2021 review of studies involving children in 34 low- and middle-income countries found that 48.5 percent had elevated levels of lead in their blood. But in a globalized economy, some of the same lead pollution endangering kids in those countries can find its way into consumer products that travel around the world and contaminate the food that children in the US eat.

In the case of the applesauce, the cinnamon was originally harvested in Sri Lanka and then shipped to Ecuador, where it was ground into powder to be mixed into the products. Both countries are dealing with lead exposure crises: One 2021 study found that almost all mothers and children living in Quito, Ecuador, had levels of lead and other metals in their blood that exceeded public health guidelines. The pollution stemming from Sri Lanka’s active lead-acid battery manufacturing and recycling sector, too, has created health problems for the workers and people who live near the plants.

When the applesauce ingredients passed through Ecuador, they were contaminated there with lead before they moved for sale to the US, where there have been more than 500 confirmed or suspected cases of acute lead poisoning related to the recalled products. The FDA believes the lead may have been added intentionally for economic reasons. The Ecuadorian government has named one individual as a suspect in its own investigation.

The entire episode encapsulates the difficult truth about lead: Even though the US has cracked down within its borders, pollution elsewhere persists — and, in some cases, American efforts to reduce its own pollution merely moved the contamination to other parts of the world.

“So much of the food that we eat is coming from all over the world,” said Stephen Luby, who studies lead pollution at Stanford University. “So we are deluding ourselves if we think we can push pollution problems to low-­income countries and not worry about it.”

It will take a multifaceted, multilateral, multinational strategy to eradicate lead contamination. And it starts with recognizing the whole world is in it together.

We keep finding lead everywhere we look

Lead exposure can be either high-grade (which can lead to acute poisoning and, in rare cases, even death) or low-grade (which can still result in developmental and cardiovascular problems).

The amount of lead in the cinnamon that was used in the applesauce pouches was enormous, with a concentration of more than 5,000 parts per million. That is thousands of times higher than the amount public health experts consider to be acceptable and high enough to cause acute lead poisoning.

The ground cinnamon the FDA warned about in March, by contrast, contained 2.03 to 3.4 parts per million. Although that amount is unlikely to result in an immediate ER visit, experts emphasize that no level of lead exposure is considered safe. Likewise, the amount of lead that Consumer Reports reported finding in Lunchables was not high enough to cause acute poisoning, but in five of the 12 products they tested, the amount of lead was more than half of the levels currently permissible under California state law, the most stringent in the United States.

Experts say the goal should be to minimize all exposures, especially for kids. Even these trace amounts can contribute to health problems over the long term when added to other exposures.

“We want to eliminate all exposures, don’t get me wrong, but I think that’s a very different situation with those much, much lower levels,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, an advocacy group focused on public health and industrial pollution.

One of the fundamental challenges in eradicating lead is that pollution can be low-grade and long-running. The lead that crept into our environment during the era of leaded gasoline and lead paint is still in the soil. Even pots and pans made from recycled aluminum that was mixed with leaded products or ceramics covered with a lead-based glaze (the kind used and traded around the world) can contribute over time to higher levels of lead in a person’s blood through degradation or exposure to heat.

“It’s always been there, to be honest. From a basic level, since industrialization, lead has been there,” said Jenna Forsyth, a research scientist at Stanford who works with Luby on lead research. “Lately, there’s been a closer inspection. And the more we look, the more lead we will find.”

A recent analysis from the environmental group Pure Earth examined more than 5,000 samples of consumer products in 25 low- and middle-income countries, ranging from foods and spices to cosmetics and toys to cookware and paints. It found that 18 percent of all samples had dangerous amounts of lead, based on reference levels drawn from public health agency guidelines. About half of all of the ceramic and metallic foodware and 41 percent of the residential and commercial paints tested had excess amounts of lead.

The US food supply relies on imports from countries with high levels of lead exposure, according to a 2019 report from the same group. The United States imports nearly all of its spices, coffee, and cocoa, for example. Independent tests conducted from 2014 to 2018 found most of the chocolate products tested — 96 out of 127 — had amounts of lead and cadmium (another dangerous neurotoxin) higher than the levels allowed in California, according to the Pure Earth report.

The US also imports about half of all fruits and vegetables consumed here. Farmers in lower-income countries must sometimes rely on untreated industrial wastewater to irrigate their crops, which can then contaminate the produce that is shipped around the world.

Once lead finds its way inside a person’s body, it quickly enters the bones because of its molecular similarities to calcium. It then subsists for decades, moving around and finding easy access to important organs, including the brain. And as lead takes up residence in places where calcium is supposed to be, it disrupts important biological and neurological functions.

“Lead is a toxin like no other,” Luby said. “People think about ‘Oh, yeah. Lead’s bad. Mercury’s bad. Cadmium’s bad. Air pollution is bad. All these things.’ No — lead is really disproportionately bad.”

One global estimate of lead’s impact concluded that exposure had contributed to 5.5 million adult cardiovascular deaths and $6 trillion in lost economic potential in 2019. “But we don’t see lead. We don’t think about it,” Luby said. “When Dad dies of a heart attack, we don’t blame it on lead.”

Three reasons for continued lead contamination

We’re all at risk from lead — but not at equal risk. Children in low- and middle-income countries have average blood lead levels roughly three times higher than those in high-income countries, based on the available national data. While one in three children worldwide have dangerously high amounts of lead in their blood, the share is closer to one in every two children in the developing world.

Lead-battery manufacturing and recycling in lower-income countries where plants are subject to less regulation can lead to local pollution. There are fewer restrictions on lead in paint and other everyday products (food included) in the developing world. And, as mentioned, exposure also comes through agricultural practices. In the US, besides food imports, deterioration of aging civil infrastructure contributes to exposure, as was the case with lead-leaching water pipes in Flint, Michigan. Lead ammunition, commonplace in the US, has also been linked to elevated lead levels in children’s blood.

Lead’s persistence, unfortunately, is multifaceted. Drew McCartor, executive director of Pure Earth, put the sources into three buckets.

First, some polluters actively disregard the rules around lead use and its known health effects and intentionally continue to use lead in their products. Spices are a good example of how this can happen: Lead chromate pigment is often used to produce a more vibrant color in spices such as cinnamon and turmeric.

Forsyth, in her work with Luby to address lead exposure linked to turmeric among rural mothers in Bangladesh, noted that the use of lead chromate is “economically motivated.” It adds the yellow color desirable in traditional turmeric. It is also denser than the spice itself and reduces the amount of time it takes to process the turmeric’s roots, which increases the producer’s yield. The FDA has said it is investigating whether the presence of lead found in the cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches was the result of such practices.

Companies have proven adept at migrating their operations to less restrictive jurisdictions. That’s a particular problem for lead-acid batteries, which are most commonly used for automobiles and represent about 85 percent of lead’s use in the modern global economy. Most lead batteries are recycled to make new ones, but lead recycling has been linked again and again to the contamination of nearby soil and water.

The US sends most of its used car batteries to Mexico to be recycled, and the towns there that are home to recycling plants have been found to have extremely high lead levels. “You look at the history of battery recycling in the US, which is basically closed down and overwhelmingly moved to places where there’s weaker environmental regulation,” Forsyth said. “We in the wealthy world are like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want cheap batteries.’ And the fact that it’s killing people nearby in another country is a connection we don’t make.”

The second source of contamination is negligence, when companies fail to address lead levels that do not exceed regulations but still present a risk. A toy manufacturer that doesn’t test its raw materials for lead or a food maker who doesn’t perform due diligence on their suppliers may not be intentionally contributing to lead pollution, but their lackadaisical attitude allows lead to continue moving through the economy, where it ends up exposing consumers, including children.

Last, there are the legacy sources of lead, the result of our overdependence on the material in the decades before we realized how dangerous it was.

Lead was added to gasoline as an anti-knocking agent to improve the performance of automobiles’ combustion engines. By burning leaded gas, humans pumped lead into the atmosphere for decades; the US did not completely phase it out until 1996. That lead eventually settled into the soil, where it is difficult and expensive to remove.

It’s the same story with leaded paint: The paint chips and slowly erodes, creating lead-laden dust that finds its way into the soil or the water supply. Commonly used pesticides have likewise left lead behind in the ground where they were sprayed. And lead used in other products is likely to be around for years in one form or another, creating more and more of those small-scale exposures that add up over time.

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"A new way to utilize waste plastics, which are a serious social problem."

By Wes Stenzel April 3, 2024

Scientists have developed a method that will allow plastic waste to be used in chemical reactions that make toxic compounds safer — and the process involves smashing plastic bags with a metal ball.

Plastic bags — like the kind you find in grocery stores — have long been detrimental to human, animal, and environmental health because of choking hazards and the fact that they take hundreds of years to break down. 

Now, researchers at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (ICReDD) at Hokkaido University have discovered that when plastic bags are thrown into a ball mill (which rapidly mixes solids using a steel ball), their chemical bonds break apart, creating radicals, which are agents that set off chemical reactions that lead to dehalogenation, according to Interesting Engineering.

These radicals can strip halogens out of toxic substances, thus making them safer for everyone and everything that comes into contact with them. Interesting Engineering says of the breakthrough, "It's a game-changer for handling toxic compounds used in various industries."

Since humans produce a scary amount of plastic waste — about 267 million tons a year, according to some estimates — finding alternative uses for plastic is essential in curbing pollution to keep as much plastic waste out of our environment as possible. Scientists have also developed ways to convert plastic waste into valuable chemicals, asphalt, and energy.

"I believe that this approach will lead to not only the development of safe and highly efficient radical-based reactions, but also to a new way to utilize waste plastics, which are a serious social problem," said associate professor Koji Kubota of Hokkaido's ICReDD program, which operates in conjunction with the World Premier International Research Center Initiative.

Clothing from many of the world’s favorite brands lies in discarded heaps in Chile’s Atacama Desert. How it got there tells the story of modern fast fashion.

By John Bartlett

Photographs by Tamara Merino

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile stretches from the Pacific to the Andes across a barren expanse of red-orange rock canyons and peaks. As one of the driest deserts on Earth, it’s a bucket-list destination for stargazing tourists who come for some of the clearest views of the night sky. With its arid, rocky landscape so closely resembling Mars, the desert has even attracted the attention of NASA, which has tested rovers there.

But the Atacama has also attained a less wondrous distinction as one of the world’s fast-growing dumps of discarded clothes, thanks to the rapid mass production of inexpensive attire known as fast fashion. The phenomenon has created so much waste that the UN calls it “an environmental and social emergency.” The challenge is turning off that tap.

The numbers tell the tale. Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production doubled and consumers began buying 60 percent more clothes and wearing them for half as long as they once did. Three-fifths of all clothing is estimated to end up in landfills or incinerators within a year of production—that can translate to a truckload of used clothing dumped or burned every second. Most of the facilities are in South Asia or Africa, where the nations receiving those loads cannot handle the amount. A landfill near Accra, Ghana’s capital, that is said to be 60 percent clothes and 65 feet high has gained international notoriety as a symbol of the crisis.

The scene in northern Chile has been dubbed in one online video “the great fashion garbage patch,” a terrestrial variation of the better-known Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Colossal piles of discarded clothes, with labels from all over the world, stretch as far as the eye can see on the outskirts of Alto Hospicio, a hardscrabble city of 120,000 residents. In one ravine, a pile of jeans and suit jackets, bleached by the harsh sun, rises above a mound of fake-fur coats and dress shirts, some still bearing price tags. Bottles, bags, and other trash are mixed in.

As images of the clothing heaps spread on the internet, many Chileans expressed surprise. “I was shocked to think that we were becoming the textile dump for developed countries,” says Franklin Zepeda, a director of a company that focuses on circular economic practices. But the story of how the South American nation came to be a repository for the world’s apparel rejects has as much to do with globalization and trade as it does with fleeting style trends.

At first glance, it might seem that an isolated desert nearly a thousand miles from Chile’s population centers would be an unlikely destination for fast fashion’s discards, but the country is also home to one of South America’s largest duty-free ports—located in the coastal city of Iquique on the Atacama’s western edge. Millions of tons of clothes arrive annually from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Last year’s tally was 46 million tons, according to Chilean customs statistics.

(Is there a better way to get rid of old clothes?)

Duty-free ports encourage economic activity, as goods are imported and often reexported without the usual taxes and fees. The duty-free port was established in Iquique in 1975 to help generate jobs and improve an ailing local economy. Chile became one of the world’s largest importers of used clothes, which transformed Iquique. As fast fashion exploded, so did imports.

“The zona franca [free zone] was a true revolution” for the city’s residents, says Bernardo Guerrero, a sociologist at Fundación Crear, an organization that studies Iquique’s history and culture. “They suddenly had access to things they could never have imagined, like their own car.” Apparel began washing in and out of Iquique like waves as global fashions changed. Guerrero recalls a time in the 1990s when almost everybody in the city wore the same style of puffer jacket after large shipments of them arrived. It was a sign of what was to come.

About 2,000 businesses of all types now operate in the duty-free zone; more than half are foreign. Hand-painted brand logos adorn warehouse doorways, and stacks of used cars—another major import—tower over the narrow streets. The free zone has also developed into a sorting depot for textile waste.

“In essence, we are just recycling the world’s clothes,” says Mehmet Yildiz, who arrived in Chile from his native Turkey two decades ago and operates a clothing import business named Dilara. Yildiz brings in clothes from the United States and Europe, most of them from thrift stores such as Goodwill. Once the garments reach Iquique, workers separate them into four categories, ranging from premium to poor quality. Yildiz then exports the best to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Asia, Africa—and even back to the U.S. for resale.

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Researchers used tinned fish to reconstruct parasitic population change, giving new meaning to the phrase “opening a can of worms”

BY RACHEL NUWER

Chelsea Wood, a parasite ecologist at the University of Washington, and her then graduate student Natalie Mastick had been pondering for months how they could reconstruct fluctuations over time in the risk parasites pose to marine mammals in the Pacific Northwest. No long-term datasets exist for the vast majority of parasitic species, so Wood and Mastick knew they’d have to get creative. One idea they had was to use salmon’s parasitic loads as proxies for marine mammal infection.

Killer whales, seals and belugas prey on salmon, which are an intermediate host for various nematodes that complete their several-step life cycle in those predators. The parasites cannot breed and enter the environment without marine mammals, so the level of infection in salmon is intimately tied to that of their predators.

While the logic behind the researchers’ idea of using salmon parasites to understand marine mammal parasites was sound, there was still one problem: Where would they get a bunch of old salmon that they could dissect to look for parasites?

They seemed to be out of options when, “out of the blue,” Wood says, she received a call from the Seafood Products Association, a trade organization in Seattle. The group told her it was cleaning out its basement and was getting rid of stacks of dusty boxes of long-expired canned salmon. Before throwing the cans away, the association wondered if Wood might want them.

“We were like, ‘Worms could be in there!’” Wood recalls. “That’s how we started on this study: [the Seafood Products Association] asking us if we wanted this trash from their basement and us saying, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

Wood and Mastick’s hunch about canned salmon possibly serving as a time capsule for worms turned out to be correct: the tinned fish contained lots of parasites. As the researchers reported this week in Ecology and Evolution, they were able to use the recovered parasites to reconstruct how infection burden has changed over the course of 42 years in four salmon species and found that it increased in two. While this might sound like a bad thing, the researchers suspect that the uptick in worms signals “a conservation success story” for marine mammals, Wood says. “It’s possible as marine mammals have come back, their parasites have come back, too.”

Canned salmon gets cooked as it’s sealed, so going into the study, the researchers were unsure whether they would be able to detect any anisakids, the type of parasitic nematodes that infect the muscle of Alaskan salmon. The worms, however, “were very noticeable—at least for us,” Wood says. “We were really surprised.”

Anisakids find their way into salmon through smaller intermediate hosts such as krill or fish. After the salmon eat those smaller hosts, the parasites burrow into the salmon’s muscle, making “a little pocket,” Wood says. She and her colleagues carefully picked through the salmon muscle tissue with forceps, and when they opened one of the pockets, the worms tended to “spring out,” Wood says. “They were very easily visible.” (These worms occur in many types of seafood, she adds, and because they are killed in the cooking process, they pose no danger to humans unless food is undercooked or a person has a particular allergy to them.)

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Testing of 40 types of bandages found 65% had alarming levels of ‘forever chemicals’ in adhesive flaps and pads that touch wounds

Many popular US bandage brands contain alarming levels of toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”, new research suggests, raising questions about the products’ safety.

Testing of 40 types of bandages made by companies such as Band-Aid, Curad, Walmart and CVS found 26 products, or 65%, contain alarming levels of a marker of PFAS. The chemicals were detected in the adhesive flaps and in absorbent pads that press against wounds.

The findings are a “wake-up call” for companies that have the chemicals in their products, said Linda Birnbaum, a former senior Environmental Protection Agency official who analyzed the findings of bandage testing commissioned by the Mamavation blog.

“This stuff can directly enter the body from the bandage and it doesn’t make sense for these companies to use it,” Birnbaum said. Research has found PFAS can be easily absorbed by the skin, which Birnbaum said makes the use of absorbent pads that touch wounds all the more concerning.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 15,000 chemicals often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and are linked to cancer, liver problems, thyroid issues, birth defects, kidney disease, decreased immunity and other serious health problems.

Most companies do not alert consumers to their use of PFAS in products, and rules favorable to the industry rules allow manufacturers to claim the chemicals’ use as a trade secret. However, independent testing has increasingly revealed the wide use of PFAS, especially in personal care products such as dental floss or toilet paper.

The Food and Drug Administration has done little to restrict their use, and no limits exist for levels in personal care products. Band-Aid did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

PFAS are commonly used in adhesives because the chemicals help with moistening and penetrate the substrate to improve the bond, which may explain their presence in bandage flaps.

But PFAS were found at the highest levels in the absorbent pads, possibly because they prevent blood from soaking through the bandage, Birnbaum said, though she stressed it was unclear because companies hide such information. It is possible that some companies are unintentionally adding PFAS because the chemicals are used as processing aids during manufacturing.

About one-third of the brands tested did not contain PFAS, which Birnbaum said highlighted that the chemicals do not need to be used to make bandages effective.

“PFAS are everywhere and unless we stop using them unnecessarily they are just going to continue building up in the environment and our bodies,” she said.

At the Green Propulsion Laboratory in Italy, scientists are trying to harness natural organisms to rehabilitate the environment. Photographer Luigi Avantaggiato explores

By Matthew Sparkes

THESE curious experiments are products of the Green Propulsion Laboratory in Venice, Italy: a publicly owned research centre exploring new ways to rehabilitate the environment and generate energy. An unusual mix of scientists, engineers and psychologists at the lab have created prototypes that harness natural organisms to do useful jobs, often taking on a sculptural aspect as a side effect that attracts resident artists.

“Despite being objects of science, there is beauty,” says photographer Luigi Avantaggiato. He spent time cataloguing devices such as Purple-B (shown above), which uses a bacterium called Rhodopseudomonas palustris, commonly found in the Venice lagoon, to convert human waste into useful hydrogen. The experiment has been funded by the European Space Agency as it could provide a way to process astronauts’ waste in orbit and create usable fuel, but it could be of use on Earth’s surface too.

The bright green contents of several tanks in the lab (pictured above) are what is known as the Liquid Forest, a project in which tiny algae, such as Chlorella, capture the carbon dioxide that is warming our planet. Each tank contains 250 litres, and every cubic centimetre of that can hold around a billion algae.

Another shot (pictured above) shows a geodesic dome in which environmental engineers from a start-up called 9-Tech are working on new ways to recover silicon from obsolete solar panels.

The whole lab site was created by Veritas, which handles the waste and water supply for around a million residents and 50 million tourists in Venice and Treviso.

Trump administration officials barred experts from warning legislators that they were about to write a major environmental loophole into law, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staffers alleged in newly revealed internal communications.  

The loophole, arising from a clause in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), enabled many companies to avoid disclosing releases of toxic “forever chemicals” to the EPA. 

Internal EPA correspondence obtained by The Hill shows that career staff members attempted to make Congress aware of the issue, but they believe their efforts were rebuffed by political appointees. 

One employee lamented that career staff “had tried to tell” the Senate about the problem, but he could not get approval to do so.   

The clause at issue, written by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (SEPW), said on Jan. 1, 2020, some of the chemicals — also known as PFAS — must be included in the EPA’s reporting database for toxic chemical releases: the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).   

But while the clause specified an annual reporting threshold for the compounds, it did not indicate whether Congress intended to deem them “chemicals of special concern,” as opposed to the baseline “standard chemical” label.   

Without the stricter designation, polluters could hide their discharges under an exemption intended for chemicals released in small proportions, called “de minimis” concentrations. 

Some EPA experts wanted to point this out to Senate staffers but said they were blocked from doing so.  

In August 2019, EPA career official David Turk wrote that his team “noticed some nuances that we had not considered previously that might be worth raising to [Senate] staff.” 

Turk, head of the data-gathering and analysis division within the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT), expressed concern that under the NDAA as drafted, companies would be able to get out of reporting their PFAS discharges if they only made up a small percentage of the total discharge.  

“Note that in contacting SEPW staff, we do not plan to take a position on this issue, but rather would like to convey a consideration that we had failed to raise previously,” Turk wrote. 

His colleague Daniel Bushman, who at the time served as TRI petitions coordinator and chemical list manager, added that “the fix could be as simple as the bill just saying to add PFAS to the list of chemicals of special concern with a 100 pound reporting threshold.” 

Known for their persistence in the body and the environment, PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have been linked to cancers and other serious illnesses. They are present in household items such as nonstick pans, cosmetics and waterproof apparel, and in certain types of firefighting foam. 

With no direction otherwise from the NDAA, the EPA’s toxics branch codified 172 types of PFAS as standard chemicals and thereby opened the reporting loophole — publishing an initial version of the rule in May 2020 and finalizing it a month later.  

Under this classification, if levels of PFOA, a particularly toxic type of PFAS, constituted less than 0.1 percent of a given mixture, or if those of the other 171 kinds of the toxic compounds were below 1 percent, sites would be exempt from disclosing their discharge. Given that even unsafe levels of PFAS generally occur in comparatively tiny quantities, the classification meant that hardly any facilities would need to file a report.  

Bureaucratic breakdown 

EPA experts from the Toxics Release Inventory Program had recognized the problem nearly a year before — but found themselves talking to a brick wall built by the Trump administration, according to the internal correspondence.  

The experts recalled trying to inform the Senate committee that the language they were incorporating would not likely lead to stricter PFAS release reporting.  

But these messages apparently never reached their intended recipients. 

“Starting in late July 2019 we became aware of this issue and tried to raise it with Michal on multiple occasions,” Turk wrote in a June 10, 2020, email chain. 

Turk was referring to Michal Freedhoff, who at the time served as minority director of oversight — a Democratic staffer — for the Senate committee.  

That same day in 2020, Turk made similar remarks to another colleague, Stephanie Griffin, noting that “SEPW staff is pissed that we didn’t tell them about the whole chemicals of special concern issue.”  

“We had tried to tell them,” he continued. “It’s all very awkward.” 

Asked by Griffin where the breakdown in communication occurred, Turk said that it was “initially, Mark Hartman. And then Nancy Beck.”  

Mark Hartman, the OPPT’s deputy director of programs, is a career official. Nancy Beck was a Trump appointee who served as deputy and then principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), which houses the OPPT. Prior to taking on the EPA role, Beck worked for five years as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry lobbying group.     

In his exchange with Griffin, Turk then recounted a situation in which he and his colleagues were blocked from sharing the issue with the Senate committee. 

“Then we finally did get approval to include it in materials to send to Nancy that she might then send to SEPW, which we knew she wouldn’t send to them,” Turk added. 

The “awkwardness” Turk referred to stemmed from an email sent earlier that day from Freedhoff to Sven-Erik Kaiser of the EPA’s Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations, expressing shock that the May prepublication labeled PFAS as standard chemicals. The designation, she noted, could make PFAS “eligible for the de minimis concentration exemption.” 

“To get around TRI reporting for a listed PFAS chemical, all one would need to do is dilute the 100 lbs in 10,000 lbs of something else,” Freedhoff wrote. “This is not what Congress intended — we intended for reporting to occur for all releases that exceeded 100 lbs.” 

She stressed that the purpose of the NDAA clause “was certainly NOT to allow an entity to avoid reporting in the first place.”   

A significant portion of the June 11 communications among Turk and his colleagues were redacted under Freedom of Information Act procedures. But one visible portion affirmed Freedhoff’s assertions that EPA staffers never warned her that the NDAA language could prevent PFAS from being listed as chemicals of special concern.  

“We did not have direct interactions with Michal and did not control the delivery of information to Michal,” Turk added. “It appears that our messages on the topic never did reach her.”  

Slipping through the cracks 

Correspondence from 2019 shows that career EPA staffers made multiple attempts to warn Freedhoff about the loophole. 

Kaiser, a career official at the agency, initially expressed confidence to her that the clause would do what lawmakers wanted. In a June 17, 2019, email to Kaiser about the clause in question, Freedhoff asked whether “this does what it needs to do.” Kaiser responded that the EPA believed the “language achieves the drafters’ intent.”  

But less than a month later — on July 10, 2019 — Bushman, the TRI petition coordinator, noted that the draft “does not classify PFAS as chemicals of special concern.”  

Bushman expressed concern that facilities would be able to claim that they stayed below the annual reporting thresholds, which he said “defeats the idea of having 100 lb reporting threshold to capture small quantities.”  

Turk echoed Bushman’s comments, also noting on July 10, 2019, that the reporting loophole “would put a [serious] damper on the utility of the TRI data.” 

A few weeks later, on Aug. 6, Turk wrote to several staff members and Hartman, the OPPT’s deputy director of programs, warning that under the NDAA draft as written, companies would be able to “use the de minimis exemption, which could result in the loss of reporting.”  

Turk expressed similar unease on Sept. 12, 2019, alerting Kaiser that the TRI/OPPT team had generated technical assistance “when Nancy reached out for info,” but that “it was unclear” whether the EPA was “also providing that document to SEPW staff.”  

Turk asked Kaiser if it “would be inappropriate to share” the special concern details with Freedhoff. Kaiser said he would “see if there’s an opportunity,” but that he thought they had previously raised the matter and that Senate staff “weren’t in position to address it at the time.” 

Turk emphasized that he had only recognized this “nuance” recently — meaning that if his message was not conveyed alongside the technical data Beck had requested, then EPA staff would have “never raised it” to SEPW, as they “wouldn’t have known to do so.” 

A week later, on Sept. 19, Turk once again informed his colleagues that he was uncertain as to whether the EPA team ever delivered the message to SEPW.  

“I believe it went to Nancy Beck, but I don’t know if it went to SEPW,” Turk said.  

To this, longtime career staffer Tala Henry, then deputy director of OPPT, responded, “I don’t think we can raise other issues,” adding that this “specific request is late in the game.” 

Asked by email why she might have deemed the request “too late in the game,” Henry, who no longer works at the EPA, stressed that she had not reviewed the correspondence, which was available due to a Freedom of Information Act request.  

But based on her memory of the internal EPA exchanges, she said she recalled that “the TRI team had already provided the technical assistance requested by SEPW.”  

This process, Henry continued, occurred “with all requisite clearance by EPA Office of General Counsel and political leadership and coordination clearance through EPAs Office of Congressional Affairs.” 

“The legislation (part of the NDAA) was imminent,” she added. 

An outcome ‘of maximum awkwardness’ 

Nine months after the September 2019 internal EPA communications, in June 2020, it became clear Freedhoff and her SEPW team had never received the information about the loophole that agency staffers had tried to convey.  

On June 9, Turk reported in an email to his colleagues that he had done “a little researching of [his] inbox” and indicated his concern that the career staffers’ message had not been relayed to the committee, despite Kaiser recalling in a past exchange with Turk that it had been. 

“I don’t believe that we had yet presented this topic to him as something to share with SEPW, for at the OPPT or OCSPP level it kept getting stripped,” Turk wrote.  

By this time, the EPA had issued its rule codifying PFAS as a standard chemical.  

In Freedhoff’s June 10 email expressing shock about the classification, originally sent to Kaiser, she asked whether the EPA could withdraw the rule prior to its official publication and launch a notice and comment process to allow her colleagues “to describe their intent in writing.” 

As the email spread among EPA staffers that day, Turk told Griffin, an OPPT team lead, that Freedhoff had asked “to pull the final rule because it doesn’t reflect their intent.”  

Reiterating how he and his team had anticipated this outcome the summer before, Turk stressed that they “had discussed that SEPW would be upset when they learned that we didn’t tell them of this issue, which was one of the reasons we had tried to tell them of it.” 

At around the same time, Turk told Bushman, the TRI petition coordinator, that he was “not looking forward to the ‘discussion’ with Michal.”  

“It’s not like we can be open/honest with her given that we had wanted to convey all of this to her but we hadn’t been able to do so,” he continued. “‘You got it wrong, we realized that you got it wrong, and we never told you,’ also isn’t a viable discussion.” 

“I suppose we can point to Nancy Beck. But, even that, seems fishy,” Turk added.  

Bushman agreed, though he said he was reluctant “to take the heat for management’s unwillingness to let them know that what they were writing was not going to get them what they wanted.”  

But he surmised that nothing could be done about the situation at the time, adding that “if the Admin changes then next year we could likely address it.” 

Asked about the accusations lodged against her by the EPA staffers, Beck, who is today director of regulatory science at the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, said that she did not have time to delve into all the correspondence.  

Beck noted, however, that in January 2019, Alexandra Dunn became the Senate-confirmed assistant administrator of the OCSPP — the position directly above her.  

“She was the decision maker, not me,” Beck wrote in an email, adding that she “went on a detail” to the National Economic Council in June 2019. “Perhaps Alex has a recollection of this issue and can discuss it with you.” 

The Hill has reached out to Dunn, who is now the president and CEO of agrochemicals group CropLife America, for comment. 

As Turk and Bushman wrote back and forth on that June 10, 2020, evening, the former suggested how interesting it would be “if the admin changes and Michal joins the EPA,” predicting “the most ridiculous outcome in terms of maximum awkwardness.” 

Whether Turk was joking or serious, this is at least in part what happened. Freedhoff assumed Beck’s former role in January 2021 and received Senate confirmation to lead the OCSPP later that year.   

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Something sinister is throwing off the silent timekeepers in trunks.

BY DARREN ORF PUBLISHED: APR 09, 2024 7:30 AM EST

• Trees use unseen circadian rhthyms, or genetic oscillations, to keep track of sequestering carbon or when to go dormant.

• A new study by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council says that a warming world can disrupt this biological clock, which can be a big problem for species that are not tolerant to warmer weather.

• Future temperature increases could drastically change the compositions of forests around the worl

Go on a globe-trotting flight and you’ll quickly get acquainted with your circadian rhythm. That grogginess you feel the next morning post-flight? That’s your internal clock completely out of whack. Humans and animals aren’t the only beings that rely on this unseen timekeeping, trees also can track time independent of inputs from their surrounding ecosystem, but a warming world could be confusing this system that trees rely on to sequester carbon — or even survive.

A new study by National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina studied lenga beech saplings of the species Nothofagus pumilio, a deciduous tree native to the Andes. Although capable of surviving in temperatures down to -22 degrees Fahrenheit, the tree isn’t a fan of warmer weather like its close cousin, Nothofagus obliqua. The scientists discovered that at higher temperatures, the oscillations of 24 genes that regulate the lenga beech’s internal clock were altered. The study was published on the preprint server Biorxiv.

Plant survival in a warmer world requires the timely adjustment of biological processes to cyclical changes in the new environment. Circadian oscillators have been proposed to contribute to thermal adaptation and plasticity in plants,” the paper reads. “We revealed that the upper thermal limits for accurate clock function are linked to the species’ thermal niches and contribute to seedling plasticity in natural environments.”

According to New Scientist, when the circadian rhythms were reset, the tree showed continued patterns of “genetic oscillation.” These changes in oscillations and warmer temperatures made the saplings of the cold-loving Andean beech smaller than the warm-loving N. obliqua. While data about the effects of these circadian oscillations is scarce, misaligned temperatures cues have caused other species of trees to go into out-of-season dormancy, the period when a tree prepares for freezing temperatures.

This is particularly bad news for trees like N. pumilio, whose warm-weather aversion could be an issue as global temperatures continue to climb.

“In this context, the investigation of genes responsible for thermal stability of the circadian clock may contribute to the selection of plant genotypes/populations with increased resistance to warming,” the paper reads. “The effect of increasing temperatures on oscillator function may be one factor which constrains the regeneration of the dominant species N. pumilio, potentially jeopardizing the integrity of the ecosystem of the Andean-Patagonian forests.”

It’s obvious that climate change will change our world, but the unseen temporal worlds of the plant kingdom also won’t escape unscathed.

Last updated: Aug 23, 2021 • 5 min read

Between air pollution and the depletion of natural resources, humans are negatively impacting the environment more and more each day. As the human population expands and more countries move towards a consumerist culture, large areas of the earth face a devastating loss of ancient natural environments, species, and water—just to name a few. Climate change—which is occuring due to over dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels, water pollution, the destruction of the ozone layer, and soil erosion loom—threatens the way we live our lives.

Anthropologist and environment activist Dr. Jane Goodall—best known for her work with wild chimpanzees in Africa—wants us all to sit up and do something about it.

How Dr. Goodall Became an Environmental Activist

Dr. Goodall knows the moment when she changed from scientist to activist. The year was 1986, and Dr. Goodall had published a book called Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. The head of the Chicago Academy of Sciences told Dr. Goodall that her book warranted a conference, so they held one.

At the conference, scientists talked about different aspects of chimp behavior in different areas and their various habitats and cultures. There was one session on conservation, however, that opened Dr. Goodall’s eyes. What she learned in the conservation lectures was appalling. Scientists showed slides and movies of the destruction of forest habitats. They had data that showed declining chimpanzee numbers. They discussed another problem, the bushmeat trade, which is the commercial hunting of wild animals for food. Chimp mothers were shot so that their babies could be stolen to sell for entertainment, to circuses and zoos for medical research.

At the same conference there was also a session about the living conditions of captive chimps. Dr. Goodall learned about the very cruel training of chimps used in entertainment. She watched secretly filmed footage of chimpanzees in medical research laboratories. The bare cages surrounded by bars in which the chimps were kept were only five feet by five feet. After seeing these images, Dr. Goodall couldn’t sleep for nights. She didn’t know it yet, but she would leave that conference an activist.

“I went to that conference as a scientist with a wonderful life, planning to go on studying chimpanzees in Gombe and without making any conscious decision, I left as an activist,” Dr. Goodall says. “Because I knew I had to try and do something for these chimpanzees who had already given me so much.”

Negative Environmental Impact on Humans and the Earth

In addition to learning about the atrocities chimps faced, Dr. Goodall was also discovering the problems faced by humans living near chimp habitats. These people were challenged by poverty, hunger, a lack of education and health care, competition for diminishing resources, and a population growth that was threatening their existence. That’s when it hit Dr. Goodall: How can we, she pondered, even try to save these chimpanzees while people living around the borders of their forest are also in a terrible situation?

“It was shocking,” Dr. Goodall says. “It was absolutely shocking, because everywhere people were showing slides or movies of the destruction of the habitat. Chimpanzee numbers that were dropping.”

Dr. Goodall asked herself how it was possible that we humans, the most intellectual creatures that have ever walked on Earth, were destroying our only home. She saw a disconnect between the clever mind and the human heart. Instead of making major decisions based on how human activities will affect future generations, we make decisions depending on how they affect us right now, even if it means depleting our supply of natural resources and increasing our carbon footprint.

Dr. Goodall realized that we have become caught up in a materialistic and greedy world, and that this has dire consequences for the future. We are so interested in money and personal gain that we are neglecting important things like collective human health, clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. She resolved to do something about it before it was too late.

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The official timekeepers of Earth history are in an uproar after a key scientific panel decided this week that the planet’s geologic timeline should not include a radical new chapter defined by human impacts: the Anthropocene.

In a vote that concluded Monday night, the group of scholars responsible for delineating the past 2.6 million years of geologic history rejected a proposal that would mark the start of the Anthropocene epoch in the mid-20th century, when global trade, nuclear weapons tests and rampant fossil fuel consumption radically altered the Earth.

But Anthropocene advocates — including two leading members of the panel that just voted — say the decision by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy violated the rules for naming new geologic time spans. Subcommission chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head on Wednesday called for an investigation into the voting process that could lead to the decision being overturned.

The contested vote, which was first reported by the New York Times, has exposed a deepening rift in the hidebound world of stratigraphy — the science of measuring geologic time.

Researchers overwhelmingly agree that people have transformed the climate and put ecosystems in peril. But most members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy felt this “Age of Humans” should not be rigidly defined as an epoch — a stretch of geologic time that typically spans thousands or even millions of years.

“It suggests that all of a sudden, within my lifetime, the changes that are affecting the planet suddenly appeared,” said Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge who voted against the Anthropocene proposal. “But humans have in fact been influencing the natural environment for 40,000 years.”

Yet proponents of the new epoch say that humans have caused greater changes in the past seven decades than in the thousands of years that came before — and that the geologic timeline should reflect our overwhelming influence.

“We’ve provided ample evidence that the rate at which humans have an impact on the planet has increased dramatically,” said Francine McCarthy, a professor of earth science at Brock University in Ontario. “It’s hard to understand how anyone who looks at the science can say that there wasn’t a massive tipping point in the mid-20th century.”

Though artists, activists and academics have used the term “Anthropocene” for decades, the debate over its geologic definition didn’t begin in earnest until 2009, when the body that oversees Earth’s 4.6-billion-year timeline appointed a working group to investigate the idea.

In a search that spanned from mountain summits to the depths of the oceans, the Anthropocene Working Group identified more than 100 distinct markers of how human activities have left an imprint on Earth’s geologic record. Air bubbles in Antarctic ice showed the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they said. Pollen grains at the bottoms of lakes documented how rising global temperatures were changing the compositions of forests. A host of entirely new substances — microplastics, mine waste, the bones of unnaturally large chickens — could be found in almost every corner of the planet.

Though humanity’s environmental impact stretches back millennia, the number and scale of these markers increased dramatically around 1950, the working group concluded. Although these changes unfolded in a geologic eyeblink, studies suggested their effects would be incredibly long-lasting. Even if people disappeared tomorrow, it would take tens of thousands of years for atmospheric carbon concentrations to return to preindustrial levels. And that meant the climate and ecosystems of the Holocene epoch — which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age — were gone for good.

“All these lines of evidence indicate that the Anthropocene, though currently brief, is … of sufficient scale and importance to be represented on the geologic time scale,” Leicester University geologist Colin Waters, the chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, wrote in an email to The Post.

In a formal proposal submitted in October, the working group suggested that the Anthropocene begin in 1952, when the United States’ first test of a thermonuclear bomb unleashed a plume of radioactive plutonium that circled around the world. A humble Canadian lake whose sediments contained a thousand-year record of human history would serve as the new epoch’s symbolic starting point.

Had the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy — which oversees the working group — approved the proposal, the Anthropocene would have then worked its way through the layers of geologic bureaucracy, going before the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) before facing a final ratification vote at the International Geological Congress in South Korea this summer.

Unless the ICS overturns the decision, the subcommission’s rejection represents the end of the line for the working group’s current effort. Under the rules of geologic timekeeping, researchers cannot submit another Anthropocene proposal for at least 10 years.

But that doesn’t mean the “Age of Humans” has no place in geology research, said Gibbard, who is also the secretary general of the ICS. He has advocated for the Anthropocene to be defined as a geologic event — a looser term that can describe phenomena that unfold in multiple places at different times.

Though less formal than an epoch, Gibbard said, an Anthropocene event would be no less important. Other events in geologic history include the sudden surge of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere 2.4 million years ago and the ancient profusion of biological diversity that led to many modern animal lineages.

“The work done by the AWG is excellent,” Gibbard said. “It’s not to be wasted. It’s just to be used differently, that’s all.”

At the facility, occupied by Russia for the past two years, employees describe a regime of torture and abuse—and a growing threat of disaster.

By Nataliya Gumenyuk

This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and lawyers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.

The zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied electricity to millions of households, not just in Ukraine, but in Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania as well. Until two years ago, more than 50,000 people lived in Enerhodar. Eleven thousand worked at the plant, and nearly everyone in Enerhodar had some sort of connection to it.

When Russia began its invasion, in 2022, it moved aggressively into the Zaporizhzhia region, raising fears about the safety of the plant. On February 27, 2022, just three days into the offensive, a Russian convoy advanced toward Enerhodar. For the next three days, as employees of the Zaporizhzhia plant, known as the ZNPP, worked to keep it running, residents took to the streets in an attempt to stop Russian military vehicles and troops from entering. The mayor tried to negotiate directly with the Russians.

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Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] put out a new advisory warning that even tiny amounts of some of PFAS chemicals found in drinking water may pose risks.

Scientists are finding PFAS everywhere. When products like this end up in landfills, these pollutants seep into our soil, air, and drinking water. That's how PFAS are ending up in food, wildlife, and even our bloodstream.

So, how do we navigate a world filled with harmful chemicals?

Arlene Blum is a biophysical chemist and the executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute, and she spends a lot of her time educating the public about PFAS, including members of Congress.

She guides us through what PFAS are, why they're a problem, and what can be done about them.

What are PFAS?

Short for "per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances," PFAS are a class of thousands of man-made chemicals that have been around since the 1940s.

And as the nickname suggests, "forever chemicals" are here for a long time. They don't break down, which has led to widespread contamination.

Manufacturers use PFAS to make products resistant to oil, heat, stain, or water. They are found in everything from cosmetics, to outdoor gear, non-stick pans, food wrappers, and countless others, according to the CDC.

Blum says PFAS are her "favorite" because they are the best and the worst.

"They're the best in that they're very useful at keeping things dry, keeping grease out of things," she said. "But they're the worst because... they never break down, and all of the ones that have been studied have been found to be harmful."

In 2016, the EPA said PFAS were not a threat at low levels: 70 parts per trillion. The agency just changed that advisory, lowering the "safe" threshold to essentially zero. PFAS still pose risks at levels so low that they're not detected, the EPA said.

What do PFAS do to your health?

In short, nothing good.

Scientists are still learning about the effects of PFAS on humans, but studies show these chemicals can harm different systems in the body.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says exposure to PFAS may lead to higher risk for kidney or testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels, and damage to the liver and immune system.

Additionally, a study published in the journal Hypertension found that PFAS can lead to high blood pressure in middle-aged women.

Blum says that even though everyone likely has PFAS in their body, that doesn't mean every person will develop these conditions. These are potential side effects that have been found as a result of exposure to these pollutants.

What's being done about this?

U.S. government officials have taken a number steps to address PFAS pollution on the state and federal level.

Along with the recent drinking water advisory, the EPA announced $1 billion in infrastructure grant funding to address pollution from PFAS and other chemical contaminants. Their goal is to improve health protections with things like water testing.

In October 2021, the White House announced initiatives to protect communities and the environment from PFAS. The Biden administration listed steps for eight government agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, to tackle PFAS pollution.

Several officials testified before a Senate committee hearing in 2021 about the Department of Defense's measures to deal with these chemicals, specifically at defense sites around the country. According to the DOD, it has invested more than $1.5 billion in PFAS research and cleanup efforts and is trying to help people on the frontlines that have been affected the most – like blood testing for firefighters that are exposed to the PFAS in firefighting foam.

Blum says that government regulation would force companies to take action, but the responsibility also falls on the private sector to stop using PFAS in their products.

"Manufacturers can move faster than the government," she said. "But the possibility of government regulation definitely moves them forward."

What can I do?

Well, that's complicated.

Blum pointed out that this burden shouldn't fall on the shoulders of the consumer, and PFAS can be hard to avoid completely. She says it's really up to the manufacturers and the government to stop – or ban – using these chemicals.

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Nearly 8,000 trees and shrubs in southern Louisville and health data from about 500 residents fill out the urban science experiment

Aruni Bhatnagar looked up.

“This tree right here, it’s got a lot of good leaves so you can stick a lot of air pollutants in it,” Bhatnagar, a cardiology researcher, said as he gestured toward a magnolia tree on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

Bhatnagar, silver haired and wearing a black turtleneck, was in D.C. for the World Forum on Urban Forests to speak about his $15 million Green Heart Louisville project — an initiative aimed at showing a causal connection between greenness and human health, and a potential model for U.S. cities looking to measure the effects of their tree planting.

In 2018, Bhatnagar, a University of Louisville medical school professor, decided that he wanted to “do something” about air pollution in Louisville, which has repeatedly earned failing grades for air quality from the American Lung Association. His contribution, he decided, would be to find the connection between trees and better heart health using the gold standard for evidence: clinical trials.

“The idea is to learn to examine everything, no matter how obvious they may seem,” he says.

Bhatnagar is well aware of the massive forest of urban tree research available, but much of it involves observational health studies, in which scientists measure potential correlations between urban trees and residents’ health.

“What I thought was we really don’t know if trees are beneficial for health,” Bhatnagar said.

To get beyond that, he proposed the Green Heart Louisville initiative, which launched in 2018. Over time, contractors and volunteers have planted nearly 8,000 trees and shrubs in a cluster of lower-to-middle-income neighborhoods in southern Louisville and measured health data from nearly 500 residents.

Today, the project involves more than 50 researchers, 4 universities, 4 nonprofits groups, 5 state and local government agencies, and the U.S. Forest Service. It began as a collaboration between Bhatnagar; Louisville philanthropist Christina Lee Brown; former Louisville mayor Greg Fischer; and Ted Smith, Louisville’s then-chief innovation officer. Roughly $9 million from the Nature Conservancy got things moving. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences provided another $3 million, and local donors contributed $3 million as well.

The work is focused in neighborhoods that — like many poor urban areas — have fewer trees compared with more affluent parts of the city. The neighborhoods are mixed racially and ethnically: 54 percent White, 29 percent Black and 11 percent Hispanic. A highway runs right through the areas — providing an unhealthy baseline of air pollution.

Bhatnagar collects an almost-obscene amount of data that includes blood panels, urine, hair samples, wastewater runoff, air pollution samples, soil and leaf samples, bat sounds, LiDar scans, temperature and humidity measurements, crime data, psychological surveys and sleep surveys. It is all being parsed, and relationships are starting to emerge, he said.

Among the tantalizing hypotheses Green Heart is testing: whether trees filter air pollution that can stiffen human arteries. Another is whether trees reduce stress and improve sleep by buffering noise. Some trees seem to be better at filtration than others — evergreens, for instance, filter air throughout the year and those with needles absorb harmful pollutants more efficiently than broad-leafed trees.

Another hypothesis is that trees release a suite of chemicals into the air that reduce blood pressure and stress. Bhatnagar has seen these chemicals’ metabolites show up in urine samples at higher concentrations where people have more exposure to trees and other greenery.

Cities around the country are set to receive funding from the Inflation Reduction Act this year to plant trees, and already many local governments spend millions every year on planting and maintaining trees. Cities often maintain....

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Nearly all commercial egg farms in Oregon and Washington must now keep their hens cage free, under laws that went into effect Jan. 1.

The nearly identical laws in both states were passed in 2019 but neither took effect immediately in order to give egg producers time to change their practices.

Read more here.

In vacant lots, neglected parks and patches of land along busy stretches of road, residents are gathering to plant trees — lots of them, close together.

"Tiny forests," which originated in Japan, are popping up across Canada and around the world.

"We're trying to give nature back some space," said Jorge Rojas-Arias, a project manager at Arbre Évolution, a tree-planting co-operative in Montreal.

His organization has helped with several tiny forest projects in the Montreal area and, over two days late last fall, another at the campus of John Abbott College in a west-end suburb.

In total, about 600 trees and shrubs — blue beech, swamp birch, balsam fir and two species of oak among them — were planted in an area about the size of a tennis court.

That works out to three trees for every square metre of land.

The tiny forests concept is simple allure in overheated, concrete-heavy cities: Assemble a group of volunteers, clear a plot of land and prepare the soil.

Then, plant a variety of native shrubs and trees in a small area — and watch them grow.

In their early years, the trees and shrubs grow quickly as they fight for light. Because of that, research suggests they capture more carbon, more quickly than in conventional tree planting.

Tiny forests also require little maintenance and weeding after the first few years, and quickly become a dense, multi-layered habitat for birds, butterflies and insects.

"It's a small area with a lot of ecological benefits," said Chris Levesque, a biology teacher who organized the planting at John Abbott.

Sharon MacGougan, head of the Garden City Conservation Society in Richmond, B.C., near Vancouver, where there are already four tiny forests, said the benefits aren't only ecological.

"More than that, there's a joyousness about it," she said. "It's really good for public engagement and conservation at the same time."

The Miyawaki method

The method originated with Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who was inspired by the protected old trees around his home country's religious shrines.

In effort to counter deforestation following Japan's postwar industrial boom, Miyawaki partnered with companies, including Toyota, to plant forested areas beside their factories.

In an essay later in his life, Miyawaki described how tiny forests are a way to both absorb more carbon and cope with the effects of what he described as "nature's fury."

He also believed in strengthening our connection to trees.

CBC

Updated February 18, 2024·6 min read

A tiny forest installation at the Canada Convention Centre in Vancouver on Thursday. The planting method is designed to encourage trees to grow more quickly as they fight for light, quickly creating more tree cover, and habitat for birds and insects. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

In vacant lots, neglected parks and patches of land along busy stretches of road, residents are gathering to plant trees — lots of them, close together.

"Tiny forests," which originated in Japan, are popping up across Canada and around the world.

"We're trying to give nature back some space," said Jorge Rojas-Arias, a project manager at Arbre Évolution, a tree-planting co-operative in Montreal.

His organization has helped with several tiny forest projects in the Montreal area and, over two days late last fall, another at the campus of John Abbott College in a west-end suburb.

In total, about 600 trees and shrubs — blue beech, swamp birch, balsam fir and two species of oak among them — were planted in an area about the size of a tennis court.

That works out to three trees for every square metre of land.

Jorge Rojas-Arias, a project manager at Arbre Évolution, a tree planting co-operative in Montreal, at a tiny forest planting at John Abbott College. (Benjamin Shingler/CBC)

The tiny forests concept is simple allure in overheated, concrete-heavy cities: Assemble a group of volunteers, clear a plot of land and prepare the soil.

Then, plant a variety of native shrubs and trees in a small area — and watch them grow.

In their early years, the trees and shrubs grow quickly as they fight for light. Because of that, research suggests they capture more carbon, more quickly than in conventional tree planting.

Tiny forests also require little maintenance and weeding after the first few years, and quickly become a dense, multi-layered habitat for birds, butterflies and insects.

"It's a small area with a lot of ecological benefits," said Chris Levesque, a biology teacher who organized the planting at John Abbott.

Sharon MacGougan, head of the Garden City Conservation Society in Richmond, B.C., near Vancouver, where there are already four tiny forests, said the benefits aren't only ecological.

"More than that, there's a joyousness about it," she said. "It's really good for public engagement and conservation at the same time."

Sharon MacGougan, president of the Garden City Conservation Society in Richmond, B.C., at a tiny forest installation in Vancouver. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

The Miyawaki method

The method originated with Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who was inspired by the protected old trees around his home country's religious shrines.

In effort to counter deforestation following Japan's postwar industrial boom, Miyawaki partnered with companies, including Toyota, to plant forested areas beside their factories.

In an essay later in his life, Miyawaki described how tiny forests are a way to both absorb more carbon and cope with the effects of what he described as "nature's fury."

He also believed in strengthening our connection to trees.

LISTEN | Tiny forests take hold:

"The forest is the root of all life; it is the womb that revives our biological instincts, that deepens our intelligence and increases our sensitivity as human beings," he wrote.

Miyawaki died in 2021.

Fukitaka Nishino, one of his former students, said he's not surprised the tiny forest concept is growing around the world, given concerns about climate change.

"We're destroying forests and destroying the earth, and we can't live without forests," Nishino said in an interview from Tokyo.

'A tiny jungle party'

The idea has been further popularized by Shubhendu Sharma, an engineer who was inspired after meeting Miyawaki in India in 2008.

Sharma makes the case for "tiny forests, everywhere" in a 2016 Ted Talk.

"In a natural forest like this, no management is the best management. It's a tiny jungle party," he told the audience.

"This forest grows as a collective. If the same trees, same species, would have been planted independently, it won't grow so fast. And this is how we create a 100-year-old forest in just 10 years."

There are questions, though, about whether tiny forests are the best approach to re-greening cities.

Todd Irvine, a Toronto arborist with a company called City Forest, said in certain situations tiny forests make a lot of sense, such as in areas sorely in need of tree cover.

In 15 to 20 years, however, he has cautioned his clients that "there's going to be a significant amount of maintenance from a horticultural perspective, because you're going to have some of those large trees that are going to be shaded out and they will begin to die."

"Really fast-growing trees can have structural consequences," he said.

"You'll get these really large, quite frankly, spindly trees."

Carly Ziter, a biology professor at Concordia University with an expertise in urban trees, said more research is needed to determine the best approach in Canada.

"I think sometimes people see these tiny forests as kind of a panacea for all of our ecological and social issues," she said.

"With anything that you're trying for the first time or something new in a city, monitoring is so important to understand how it works in your system, how it's perceived by people in your city, what the pitfalls are that are unique to a particular area and what the successes might be that are unique to an area."

Watching for changes

MacGougan's group received a grant to study the presence of birds at one of Richmond's new tiny forests.

"The forest will change over time and so will the species that live or nest and live in the spaces," she said.

And even if the long-term outlook isn't yet clear, their short-term effect is easy to see.

At John Abbott in Montreal, several dozen students and staff participated in the event — and many said that the act of planting itself was memorable.

"It's really a good way to connect with nature," said Rojas-Arias.

"Everyone here comes out, and they are really satisfied with their day."

Brown bears foraging for food in the Shiretoko Peninsula of Hokkaido, Japan, have been disrupting tree growth in artificial conifer forests, according to a new study published in Ecology. Researchers compared soil and tree samples from human-forested plots with samples from natural forests. They found that the bears' digging for cicada nymphs damaged tree roots and altered the nitrogen content of the soil, which in turn limited the diameter growth of trees.

The phenomenon of bears digging for cicadas, an unusual food source, appears to be restricted to human-planted conifer forests; diversely vegetated natural forests were unaffected. Bears in Hokkaido sometimes suffer from sparse food supplies, but it is not known if this is the reason for their cicada search. These results are important for animal conservation and efforts to return used land to a wild state, highlighting the value of recreating diverse local ecosystems that can support natural wildlife behavior.

On the northeastern tip of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island, sits the Shiretoko Peninsula, and within it the Shiretoko National Park. Designated a World Nature Heritage site, thanks to its thriving ecosystem and diverse wildlife, the peninsula is home to Japan's largest land animal, the brown bear.

It is estimated that almost 500 bears live within the 70-kilometer-long and 25-km-wide strip, making it one of the highest densities of brown-bear populations in the world. Bear numbers in Hokkaido have been gradually recovering since the 1990s, when conservation efforts began in earnest after decades of unchecked culling.

Rather than being an isolated wilderness, thousands of people live and work in the Shiretoko Peninsula, and it is also a popular tourist destination. Since the 1970s, residents and local government have been planting conifers, such as larch and spruce, on abandoned farmland as a way to help return the area to its original forested state.

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BY BISHOP SAND

Aruni Bhatnagar looked up.

“This tree right here, it’s got a lot of good leaves so you can stick a lot of air pollutants in it,” Bhatnagar, a cardiology researcher, said as he gestured toward a magnolia tree on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

Bhatnagar, silver haired and wearing a black turtleneck, was in D.C. for the World Forum on Urban Forests to speak about his $15 million Green Heart Louisville project — an initiative aimed at showing a causal connection between greenness and human health, and a potential model for U.S. cities looking to measure the effects of their tree planting.

In 2018, Bhatnagar, a University of Louisville medical school professor, decided that he wanted to “do something” about air pollution in Louisville, which has repeatedly earned failing grades for air quality from the American Lung Association. His contribution, he decided, would be to find the connection between trees and better heart health using the gold standard for evidence: clinical trials.

“The idea is to learn to examine everything, no matter how obvious they may seem,” he says.

Bhatnagar is well aware of the massive forest of urban tree research available, but much of it involves observational health studies, in which scientists measure potential correlations between urban trees and residents’ health.

“What I thought was we really don’t know if trees are beneficial for health,” Bhatnagar said.

To get beyond that, he proposed the Green Heart Louisville initiative, which launched in 2018. Over time, contractors and volunteers have planted nearly 8,000 trees and shrubs in a cluster of lower-to-middle-income neighborhoods in southern Louisville and measured health data from nearly 500 residents.

Today, the project involves more than 50 researchers, four universities, four nonprofit groups, five state and local government agencies, and the U.S. Forest Service. It began as a collaboration between Bhatnagar; Louisville philanthropist Christina Lee Brown; former Louisville mayor Greg Fischer; and Ted Smith, Louisville’s then-chief innovation officer. Roughly $9 million from the Nature Conservancy got things moving. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences provided another $3 million, and local donors contributed $3 million as well.

The work is focused in neighborhoods that — like many poor urban areas — have fewer trees compared with more affluent parts of the city. The neighborhoods are mixed racially and ethnically: 54 percent White, 29 percent Black and 11 percent Hispanic. A highway runs right through the areas — providing an unhealthy baseline of air pollution.

Bhatnagar collects an almost-obscene amount of data that includes blood panels, urine, hair samples, wastewater runoff, air pollution samples, soil and leaf samples, bat sounds, LiDar scans, temperature and humidity measurements, crime data, psychological surveys and sleep surveys. It is all being parsed, and relationships are starting to emerge, he said.

Among the tantalizing hypotheses Green Heart is testing: whether trees filter air pollution that can stiffen human arteries. Another is whether trees reduce stress and improve sleep by buffering noise. Some trees seem to be better at filtration than others — evergreens, for instance, filter air throughout the year and those with needles absorb harmful pollutants more efficiently than broad-leafed trees.

Another hypothesis is that trees release a suite of chemicals into the air that reduce blood pressure and stress. Bhatnagar has seen these chemicals’ metabolites show up in urine samples at higher concentrations where people have more exposure to trees and other greenery.

Cities around the country are set to receive funding from the Inflation Reduction Act this year to plant trees, and already many local governments spend millions every year on planting and maintaining trees. Cities often maintain detailed records of size and health of every tree for every block, and LiDar scans from aircraft paint a more complete model of the urban tree canopy. Medical professors also study green spaces and trees’ effects on aging. And psychologists have observed that stress levels and depressive states are less in greener areas of the city.

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The lightbulb was flickering over my head. Not the idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb. I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome.

LED bulbs do this to me all the time. The two in my youngest son’s bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them. When I left them alone for a week, they inexplicably came back on at full blast. At story time, the LED in the clamp light on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power too fast. It sits there feebly glimmering, its perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean light blobs, until you turn it off and wait a while.

For most of my life, I expected energy-saving lighting to be bad. Traditional fluorescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, were synonymous with institutional austerity and migraines. A new generation of streetlamps somehow made city nights seem darker; CFLs shattered into mercury-flecked shards. New lighting tech was something people resented and worked around. My generation, presented with thrifty overhead fluorescents in ’90s dorms, countered by plugging in the newly popular halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts would incinerate wayward moths or occasionally a stray curtain along with the university’s planned energy savings.

LEDs were going to be different. Their widespread appearance on store shelves was supposed to mark not another depressing trade-off but rather a Nobel-worthy breakthrough: They provided brilliant illumination at a fraction of the old energy costs and were nearly immortal by the old tungsten standard. The federal government has fully committed. Some rearguard action by the Trump administration delayed the process, but a new lighting-efficiency standard has finally taken effect. The Department of Energy is scheduled to start penalizing incandescent distributors and retailers this month, levying fines of as much as $542 per illicit bulb, with full enforcement of the ban beginning in August.

The plan is for LEDs to be the only available form of artificial lighting. Already, the old bulbs are dwindling to nothing on retailers’ shelves. You have to know where to look — mom-and-pop hardware stores, mostly — to get your hands on a beige-sleeved pack of Hungarian-made GE Básica bulbs or a yellow pack of GE Blanco Suaves, both with a bold stamp on the side reading, NOT FOR SALE FOR USE IN THE UNITED STATES.

Years ago, I got a head start, joining the LED revolution with fervor. Screwing one into a socket vacated by an incandescent felt like the easiest good-citizen points I’d ever earned, as if I could keep on doing things exactly as before but with better and greener results. And the light coming out of the things was — well, it was light, right? I don’t remember how long it took to notice, or think I had noticed, a series of letdowns: a faded look to the page of a storybook, a flicker in the corner of the eye, those sudden unexplained failures or half-failures. A slate-blue sock that was indistinguishable from a charcoal-gray one till I brought them over by the window. A certain unreality was creeping in.

We were renovating our apartment, and one day our contractor summoned me to the bathroom in dismay. He adjusted the dimmer switch he’d just installed, and a new LED fixture began strobing like we were in a seven-by-eight-foot basement dance club. We gave up and had him install a normal switch. The quirks were becoming malfunctions were becoming betrayals. Things I might once have ignored caught my eye. Out in the world, I noticed more and more public spaces had a frigid cast and a liminal flicker. The interiors of bubble-tea shops and ice-cream parlors took on a queasy aspect. Getting up in the early-morning darkness in a San Francisco Airbnb, I could see the bedside lamplight trembling.

I started to confide in people that I was seeing things, that the light was wrong, and usually they knew exactly what I was talking about. Over lunch, a friend unspooled an epic account of his quest for dimmable bulbs that would actually dim. A stranger in a shared taxi forwarded me a blog post he’d written about his conviction that the color of objects lit by LEDs was washed out and about his incredulity at how fast they failed.

A technology that was once the epitome of simplicity (“How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?”) has become an ever-branching set of complications. Where before I would pick up a pack of 60-watt soft-white incandescents at the hardware store, I now search the internet for the highest-rated equivalent LEDs, then systematically cross-check those equivalences point by point. Everything you used to know about indoor illumination is outmoded. For 60 watts’ worth of incandescent light, you’re looking for about 800 lumens of LED output. To make that light come out the approximate color that the old bulb generated, you need to check the listed bulb temperature and make sure it’s 2,700 degrees Kelvin.

Got it? Hang on. If you want the objects that the light shines on to look the same, you’re getting into a different color question, specifically the color-rendering index. Your incandescent bulb — a glowing analog object, its light coming from a heated wire — had a CRI of 100 for a full unbroken spectrum. Your typical LED bulb, shining with cold digital electroluminescence, will not. Some colors will be missing or just different. If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher. The box may not list any CRI at all.

Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-rendering index doesn’t really index how colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a 90 CRI make things look wan; some with an 80 are passable. There are better, more useful metrics, but you can’t have them. Nobody puts them on the packaging. One lighting professional — an LED advocate, no less — told me he sometimes calls up the manufacturer and asks to talk to an engineer to get the real specs.

To study this stuff, to attempt to stare at light and understand it, makes you suspicious of any claims to objective truth. Snap a picture of an oddly tinted space and Apple’s software will convert the image according to what it has machine-learned that white ought to be. The eye-brain system does its own constant white balancing, too. I downloaded an extremely erratic color-temperature app to try to get some grounding, an amateur feel for what professionals are trained to spot. I interrogated lighting designers, engineers, decorators, and researchers.

Most of them were enthusiasts about the technology. They praised LEDs, at their best, for their unmatched efficiency, precision, and practical power. They also said things like “There’s a lot of nonperformance” and “Super–beta phase” and “Don’t give up on beauty” and “You’re going to spend $200 on four bulbs at Home Depot” and “You start seeing grayness.”

Grayness — I was definitely seeing grayness. There ought to be a term for what happens when the light gets weaker and everyone acts as if it’s as strong as always. By the science, by the ethics, even by law, the reign of the LED is a certainty. It is taking the place of the most standard and omnipresent technology we know. And yet, when you flip the light switch, you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Read more here.

By James Hamblin

The National Academy of Sciences is urging people to focus less on the process and more on the product.

Today the National Academy of Sciences released a 420-page response to public concerns about “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs) in agriculture. The report is a leap forward in the discussion, capturing a comprehensive review of two decades of scientific literature as well as perspectives from academia, industry, activists, and those in between—on implications for the global economy, human rights, and the continued existence of species, human and otherwise.

The findings are important in that they refuse to participate in popular binary arguments—though that critical point has not fully come across in news coverage. As The New York Times reported today, “Genetically Engineered Crops Are Safe, Analysis Finds,” in that “genetically engineered crops appear to be safe to eat and safe for the environment.” The AP reported much the same, that the message of the “high-powered science advisory board” is that “genetically manipulated food remains generally safe for humans and the environment.”

This isn’t entirely accurate as a reflection of the stated intent of the academy. Nor is it, I think, a productive sentiment. It stands to perpetuate divisions among people, while the overall takeaway is more nuanced.

Read more here.

Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped?

BY DAVID A. TAYLOR
TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY INVESTIGATOR Abdelkader Abderrahmane set out from the Moroccan city of Kenitra with two research assistants to inspect sand-mining sites on the Atlantic Ocean coast. They drove across the dry, flat terrain for six kilometers, the last stretch on a rutted dirt road that had them crawling in low gear, windows closed against the hot dust. The beach dunes where they were headed lay beyond a rise. As they approached, a man wearing a gendarme cap suddenly appeared to their right, speeding toward them on an all-terrain vehicle. With angry gestures, he forced them to a stop. “Why are you here?!” he demanded. “There’s nowhere to go.” One assistant said they just wanted to visit the beach and the nearby tourist camp. The gendarme shook his head: no further.

They turned around and began to creep back down the rough road, but as soon as the gendarme was out of sight they turned off and snuck along a hidden side of the ridge. About 400 meters further they stopped and cut the engine. Abderrahmane walked quietly to the crest of the bluff to peer down, keeping low to avoid being seen. Despite all his research into illegal sand mines, he was unprepared for the scene below. Half a dozen dump trucks scattered across a deeply pitted moonscape were filled high with brown sand. Just beyond lay the light blue sea. Abderrahmane was stunned by the “major disfiguration” of the dunes, he told me later on a video call. “It was a shock.”

Part of his shock came from the sight of desecrated nature, but part came from seeing the brazenness of trucks hauling sand in full daylight. “You cannot illegally mine sand in daylight if you don’t have people helping you,” he says—people in high places. “Big companies are being protected, perhaps by ministers or deputy ministers or whoever. It’s a whole system.” Everyone in the sand-trafficking market “benefits from it, from top to bottom.”

For the past 15 years the slender, bespectacled Abderrahmane has studied environmental trade and crime for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an African research and policy advisory organization based in South Africa. ISS papers showed how environmental degradation can fuel tensions among people and compromise security. But until a few years ago Abderrahmane had never heard of sand trafficking. He had been in Mali doing fieldwork on the drug trade when a source noted that most cannabis in Mali came from Morocco and that sand trafficking was also a major market in that country, with drug traffickers involved. “I think that when you talk about sand trafficking, most people would not believe it,” Abderrahmane says. “Me included. Now I do.”

Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world’s largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature’s ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity.

Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion. Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime’s extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco’s sand is illegally mined, he says.

Luis Fernando Ramadon, a federal police specialist in Brazil who studies extractive industries, estimates that the global illegal sand trade ranges from $200 billion to $350 billion a year—more than illegal logging, gold mining and fishing combined. Buyers rarely check the provenance of sand; legal and black market sand look identical. Illegal mining rarely draws heat from law enforcement because it looks like legitimate mining—trucks, backhoes and shovels—there’s no property owner lodging complaints, and officials may be profiting. For crime syndicates, it’s easy money.

The environmental impacts are substantial. Dredging rivers destroys estuaries and habitats and exacerbates flooding. Scraping coastal ecosystems churns up vegetation, soil and seabeds and disrupts marine life. In some countries, illegal mining makes up a large portion of the total activity, and its environmental impacts are often worse than those of legitimate operators, Beiser says, all to build cities on the cheap.

Questionable mining happens worldwide. In the early 1990s in San Diego County, California, officials stopped mining from the San Luis Rey River, only to see operators move across the border into Baja California to plunder riverbeds there. Until a few years ago, a mine north of Monterey, Calif., operated by Cemex, a global construction company, was pulling more than 270,000 cubic meters of sand every year from the beach, operating in a legal gray zone. That was the last beach mine in the U.S., shut down in 2020 by grassroots pressure. Mining in rivers and deltas, however, is still going strong throughout the U.S., not all of it legal.

Read more here.

An ancient, interdependent relationship that contributes to food systems and ecosystem stability across the globe could be changing.

Many flowering plants can self-pollinate, or transfer pollen between their own blossoms for seed generation and propagation, but most of these plants have relied on pollinators such as butterflies and bees to reproduce.

Now — amid declines reported in many pollinator populations — a new study on the evolution of one flower species’ mating system has revealed a remarkable shift that could exacerbate the challenges faced by the plants’ insect partners.

The flowers’ reproductive evolution may be linked to environmental changes such as habitat destruction and rapid ongoing decreases in pollinator biodiversity, according to Samson Acoca-Pidolle, who led the study published December 19 in the journal New Phytologist.

Comparing seeds of wild field pansies collected decades ago in France with the plants’ modern descendants, Acoca-Pidolle and his colleagues discovered that today’s flowers are smaller and produce less nectar as a result of increased self-pollination, which has direct impacts on pollinator behavior. The pansies of the past self-fertilized less and attracted far more pollinators than those of the present, according to the study.

“It seems that it’s only traits that are involved in plant-pollinator interaction that are evolving,” said Acoca-Pidolle, a doctoral researcher at the University of Montpellier. The changes could constrain the plants’ ability to adapt to future environmental changes and have implications for “all of floral biodiversity” — potentially diminishing flowering plants’ genetic, species and ecosystem variation.

“This may increase the pollinator decline and cause a vicious feedback cycle,” study coauthor Pierre-Olivier Cheptou told CNN. If plants produce less nectar, there will be less food available to pollinators, which will in turn accelerate the rate at which the animals’ numbers dwindle, he explained.

“The major message is that we are currently seeing the evolutionary breakdown of plant pollinators in the wild,” said Cheptou, an evolutionary ecologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and professor at the University of Montpellier.

Resurrecting plants

Using a method called “resurrection ecology” to conduct the research, the study team germinated the seeds of four populations of wild field pansies, scientifically known as Viola arvensis, that were collected in the 1990s and early 2000s in the Paris region.

Some propagules, or parts of a plant that can be used to grow a new plant, can stay in a seed stage for a “very long time,” Acoca-Pidolle explained. They are living, but at a very low metabolic rate. “It’s like a long nap,” he said.

In 2021, the team sourced field pansies from the exact spot the ancestral seeds were collected 20 to 30 years earlier. The scientists then conducted a population genetic analysis that looked at self-pollinating rates and changes in heterozygosity, or genetic variability, as well as changes in floral traits that are associated with pollinator attraction.

In a sample of 4,000 flowers, rates of self-fertilization went from around 50% for the flowers collected two to three decades beforehand to roughly 80% for their naturally occurring descendants, the authors found. Meanwhile, the “resurrected” flowers’ surfaces were 10% bigger, produced 20% more nectar and were frequented by more bumblebees than their modern counterparts.

‘An insurance policy’

An increase in a flowering plant species self-pollinating, or “selfing,” isn’t always a bad thing, said Gretchen LeBuhn, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University who has studied interactions between pollinators and plants.

“The way to think of (selfing) is it’s sort of like a holding-on strategy,” said LeBuhn, who was not involved with the study. Although increasing selfing does often lead to a decline in genetic variation in a population, among several other negative consequences, it also can maintain the population, she added. “Like an insurance policy.”

Declining genetic variation within a plant population matters because those with a reservoir of genetic variation can better respond to major environmental changes, effectively reducing extinction risk.

But when reading the new paper, part of her “actually thought an increase in selfing means that the population is going to be preserved,” LeBuhn said. “If plants can persist through time, and pollinator populations increase again, it would say that this is a mechanism for preservation of species.”

It’s unclear whether that evolutionary shift can be reversed, however — although the new research suggests there is an expectation for a depletion in a plant population’s genetic diversity at term, according to Acoca-Pidolle.

“Some scientists believe there may be a tipping point after which a plant cannot go back,” he noted, adding that the evolutionary transition is classically considered to be “irreversible.” Investigating whether these wild pansies have the ability to recover from the impacts of selfing is the next big question, Acoca-Pidolle said.

In the meantime, it’s important to acknowledge that the authors don’t really have the data on what was happening with pollinators 20 to 30 years ago, LeBuhn said. “The one thing that they can’t document is the magnitude of difference in pollinators in these sites in that time and now,” she said — which stems from gaps in historic widespread pollinator monitoring.

“(The study) is a really important demonstration of the tight linkages between plant and pollinator communities,” LeBuhn said. “I think the next step in the research is understanding what the implications are for pollinators.”

Humankind’s lasting footprint

Other recent studies have found that declining pollinator populations, an offshoot of harmful human activities, threaten the future of food crops and the survival of the many species that depend on them.

The growing body of research bolsters the case for urgent conservation measures — like developing and protecting flower-rich habitats that act as floral and nesting resources — to help stymie global pollinator declines, according to Acoca-Pidolle.

“Our impact is not only killing some individual plants … we are putting them on an evolutionary path that could be bad for them,” Acoca-Pidolle told CNN. “And even after we disappear, for a long time, we will have a footprint on this evolutionary trajectory of many species, of the biodiversity of the planet.”

Ayurella Horn-Muller has reported for Axios and Climate Central. Her book, “Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South,” is due out in the spring.

The year was 1974. As newspaper columnists were busy wringing their hands over the development of in-vitro fertilisation and the prospect of “test-tube babies”, an alarming discovery about male fertility completely escaped their notice. 

Comparing contemporary semen samples with historical data, two doctors in Iowa named C. M. Kinloch Nelson and Raymond Bunge showed that there had been a drastic shift in men’s sperm counts over the previous two decades. In 1951, each millilitre of semen contained 107 million sperm; by the 1970s, that figure had dropped by more than 50 per cent – to just 48 million. The average volume of semen from a single ejaculation had fallen too. 

By the 1990s, the issue started catching considerably more scientific attention, although some researchers were still sceptical. They blamed differences in techniques, or the fact that studies were mostly on men already having treatment for infertility. Such doubts are now shrinking. “There is a huge body of scientific evidence showing this decline,” says Albert Salas-Huetos at the University of Rovira i Virgili in Spain. 

For researchers like Salas-Huetos, the big question is no longer whether this “spermageddon” is really happening, but why and what to do about it. Studies are beginning to shed light on environmental toxins that may be to blame, as well as other lifestyle factors contributing to the problem. With a better idea of the prime suspects, we may finally be able to put the brakes on this trend, or even reverse it. 

Globally, around 1 in 6 people have trouble conceiving, according to a recent report by the World Health Organization. There are many potential causes, but between 30 and 50 per cent of cases are linked to problems with the quantity and quality of semen. It may be that the total number of sperm is simply too low, or that the tadpole-like cells struggle to swim – a problem called poor motility – which vastly reduces the chance that sperm can reach the ovum, or egg cell. Some may have genetic defects within the chromosomes they are carrying, known as DNA fragmentation. 

Shanna Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, has led many of the most eye‑catching studies. Her interest began in the 1990s, when she was asked by the US National Academy of Sciences to independently review a study from Denmark reporting rapid sperm decline. Swan was initially sceptical: she suspected that the researchers might have missed some confounding factor in their analysis. When she crunched the data, however, she kept finding the same rate of decline predicted by the Danish team. “We didn’t change the slope at all – not down to the second decimal place,” says Swan. 

Her conviction has only increased over the subsequent decades. In 2017, she and her colleagues published a meta-analysis that considered data from 185 studies of more than 42,000 men between 1973 and 2011, making it the largest of its kind. Swan’s team examined two different measures: the concentration of sperm in a millilitre of semen and the total number of sperm in the sample. In North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, both figures seemed to be falling at a rate of around 1.5 per cent per year on average, resulting in a 50 to 60 per cent drop over the whole period. 

If the decline continued at this rate, the median sperm count would reach zero by the mid-2040s. Within a generation, “we may lose the ability to reproduce entirely”, the magazine GQ declared in 2018. 

At the time of this analysis, Swan and her team didn’t have enough data to draw strong conclusions about sperm counts in the rest of the world. They have now filled this gap in knowledge with additional data from South America, Asia and Africa. The ensuing paper, published in 2023, reported a decline on every continent studied. 

Such studies do have some limitations. Meta‑analyses can be skewed by differences between datasets. Counting sperm is a fiddly job and the technology used to do it has changed over the years, which may bias the reported numbers. Nevertheless, the latest studies control for this potential bias and the pattern remains, says Richard Lea at the University of Nottingham, UK. 

Read more here.

By Jerusalem Demsas

Environmentalism has never been a stable ideology, and its adherents have never been a monolithic group. But, in Minneapolis, the green community has fractured as a wide array of self-described environmentalists find that they don’t agree on very much anymore.

Back in 2018, Minneapolis generated national headlines for being the first major American city to eliminate single-family zoning. Under a plan called Minneapolis 2040, the city legalized duplexes and triplexes in all residential neighborhoods. The plan led to a frenzy of ambitious regulatory changes meant to yield denser, transit-accessible, and more affordable homes across the city.

The stated goals of Minneapolis 2040 included housing affordability and racial equity, but supporters also stressed the environmental benefits of funneling population growth toward the urban core instead of outlying counties. “All the evidence and data shows that when you reduce your carbon footprint by, for instance, not having a 45-minute commute in from the suburbs … it helps the environment,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me at a downtown ice-cream shop in September. “It’s really simple, right?” Maybe.

From the beginning, though, many in Minneapolis perceived the plan as an attack on their way of life. Red signs popped up proclaiming Don’t Bulldoze Our Neighborhoods, falsely implying that bureaucrats would forcibly demolish existing homes. The city council passed Minneapolis 2040 with a resounding 12–1 vote. But, as is now common with attempts to legalize more housing, the plan soon came under legal threat. A newly formed group called Smart Growth Minneapolis, the local chapter of the National Audubon Society, and another bird-enthusiast group sued under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act, which gave Minnesotans the right to legally challenge a public or private action that is “likely to cause the pollution, impairment, or destruction of the air, water, land or other natural resources located within the state.”

After a five-year legal battle, District Court Judge Joseph R. Klein ordered the city in September to stop implementation of Minneapolis 2040. The city has appealed Klein’s ruling, but as of now it must revert to the legal regime that existed prior to December 2018 until an environmental review has been completed. Hundreds of planned housing units are on hold.

On its face, the battle in Minneapolis is a fight over what types of housing should go where. But the debate is also revealing generational, ideological, and temperamental divides within the large umbrella of the environmental movement. And how these disputes are resolved will shape the future of cities, the politics of growth, and the contours of American liberalism.

I began to think of those who favored the Minneapolis plan as the “Crisis Greens.” They saw environmentalism largely through the lens of climate change and urgently demanded more government action to address the problem. They were less enamored of process than their opponents were, and less wary of change. And those skeptical of the plan, those involved in the lawsuit and those outside of it, I termed “Cautious Greens.” They were suspicious of development and sweeping government action. They saw environmentalism as encompassing varied lifestyle concerns and were thus much more focused on local impacts. But perhaps most telling, the Cautious Greens were apt to ask, with some bewilderment, What’s the problem with just taking our time?

My sympathies, I admit, lie with the Crisis Greens. The problem with taking our time is self-evident. For decades, America’s primary solution to building housing has been to encourage low-density sprawl that offered large single-family homes in exchange for traffic, onerous commutes, car-dependency, and a built environment often inhospitable to mass transit. And even sprawl can’t keep up with the demand for new housing, sending prices soaring. The Twin Cities area added 226,000 people from 2010 to 2017, according to the Metropolitan Council, a regional government agency. In that same amount of time, the region added just 63,600 homes. In Minneapolis proper, 37,000 new residents were accompanied by just 12,000 new homes from 2010 to 2016.

But the debate over Minneapolis 2040 won’t be won by the side with the best stats. “Debates about how to use and value the natural world get persistently entangled with questions of honor or status—questions about whose way of life is best,” the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy once wrote. That holds true in Minneapolis. Fundamentally, this isn’t a factual dispute; it’s a culture war over what values should define environmentalism.

If you were born after 1980 or so, the central environmental debate of your life has been climate change. Indeed, you may have learned about all other environmental problems—including retreating Arctic sea ice, disappearing polar bears, hurricanes, and other extreme weather—through the logic of ending carbon emissions. Your image of living a greener life likely has more to do with technological and behavioral changes—taking the bus instead of driving a car, buying energy-efficient appliances—that reduce your carbon footprint, rather than with whether you garden or enjoy hiking.

Millennials and subsequent generations have also grown up amid an urban renaissance. Minneapolis and most other major cities hemorrhaged residents after World War II, but since the 1990s, Americans—and young adults in particular—have rediscovered the economic, social, and cultural opportunities that cities offer. Unfortunately, this urban renaissance has been undermined by anti-growth laws that failed to build enough houses and apartments for new residents.

To the Crisis Greens, dense housing development in cities straightforwardly helps on all fronts. Writing in the local-news outlet MinnPost, the University of Minnesota urban geographer Bill Lindeke argues that promoting dense urban housing is “by far the most effective carbon reduction policy.” Focusing development in the urban environment, he writes, is fundamentally conservationist. “If regional newcomers can’t live in Minneapolis, they’ll live in Carver, Dakota and Anoka counties”—suburban areas with limited access to transit. “The direct result,” Lindeke continues, “will be habitat loss and the erasure of agricultural land in the exurbs, creating impervious surface and heat island intensification at a much larger scale.”

Read more here.

Microplastics are turning up everywhere, from remote mountain tops to deep ocean trenches. They also are in many animals, including humans.

The most common microplastics in the environment are microfibers – plastic fragments shaped like tiny threads or filaments. Microfibers come from many sources, including cigarette butts, fishing nets and ropes, but the biggest source is synthetic fabrics, which constantly shed them.

READ MORE: This New York river dumps millions of fabric microfibers into the ocean daily

Textiles shed microfibers while they are manufactured, worn and disposed of, but especially when they are washed. A single wash load can release several million microfibers. Many factors affect how many fibers are released, including fabric type, mechanical action, detergents, temperature and the duration of the wash cycle.

My research focuses on coastal ecology and water pollution, including work in New York and New Jersey marshes and estuaries that are heavily affected by human activities. Here are some things to know about reducing microplastic pollution from your washing machine.

From fabric to water and soil

Once garments release microfibers in washing machines, the fibers enter the wastewater stream, which generally goes to a wastewater treatment plant. Advanced treatment plants can remove up to 99 percent of microfibers from water. But since a single laundry load can produce millions of fibers, treated water discharged from the plant still contains a huge number of them.

Microfibers that are removed during treatment end up in sewage sludge – a mix of solid materials that is processed to remove pathogens. In many cases, treated sewage sludge is applied to soil as a fertilizer. This allows microfibers to enter air and soil, and to be transferred to soil organisms and up the terrestrial food web or taken up by crops.

Microplastics that wash into rivers, lakes and bays can have many harmful effects. They may be consumed by fish and other aquatic animals, affecting their biochemistry, physiology, reproduction, development or behavior. These microplastics contain chemical additives, including substances like phthalates and bisphenol A that can leach out and may have health effects in humans and animals, including effects on the endocrine system.

Textile microfibers also contain additional chemicals that have been shown to be toxic, such as fabric dyes, anti-wrinkle agents and flame retardants. In addition, contaminants that are present in the water, such as metals and pesticides, can stick to microplastic particles, turning them into a veritable cocktail of contaminants that may be transferred into animals that eat them

Washing more sustainably

Not all fabrics shed microfibers at the same rate. A loosely woven fabric that feels fluffy or fuzzy, such as fleece, sheds more than a tightly woven one. While garments made of natural fibers, such as cotton and wool, would appear to be a solution, unfortunately they also shed microfibers that can pick up pollutants in the environment.

Some textile scientists and manufacturers are developing fabrics that shed less than existing ones, thanks to features such as longer fibers and coatings to reduce shedding. Meanwhile, here are some ways to reduce microfiber shedding from your laundry:

• Do laundry less often. Washing full loads instead of partial loads reduces release of microfibers because garments are exposed to less friction during the wash cycle.

• Use cold water, which releases fewer microfibers than hot water.

• Use less detergent, which increases microfiber release.

• Use a front-loading washing machine, whose tumbling action produces less microfiber release.

• Dry laundry on a clothesline. Running clothes in dryers releases additional microfibers into the air from the dryer vent.

Several types of products collect microfibers in the washer before they are released with wastewater. Some are laundry bags made of woven monofilament, a single-polyamide filament that does not disintegrate into fibers. Laundry is washed while enclosed in the bag, which traps microfibers that the garments release. A study of one such product, Guppyfriend, found that it collected about one-third of released microfibers.

Another device, the Cora Ball, is a plastic ball with spines topped with soft plastic discs that capture microfibers. It reduces microfibers by about 25 percent to 30 percent, but may not be suitable for loose knits because it can snag on threads and damage clothing.

Filter your washwater

Several brands of external filters are available that can be retrofitted onto existing washing machines. External filters can remove up to 90 percent of microfibers from rinse water. Their average cost is about US$150. Owners need to clean the filters periodically and dispose of the collected microfibers with other solid waste, not down the drain, which would put them back into the wastewater stream.

In a 2021 study, researchers installed washing machine filters in 97 homes in a town in Ontario, Canada, which represented about 10 percent of the households in the community. They found that this significantly reduced microfibers in treated water from the local treatment plant.

Some companies are now manufacturing washers with built-in microfiber filters. France has enacted a requirement for all new washing machines to be equipped with filters by 2025, and Australia has announced that filters will be required in commercial and residential washers by 2030.

In the U.S., a similar requirement was passed by the California legislature in 2023, but Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, saying he was concerned about the cost to consumers. An economic study commissioned by Ocean Conservancy found that filters would increase the price of washing machines by only $14 to $20 per machine. Several states are considering regulations that would require filters in washers.

In my view, requiring manufacturers to add filters that can trap microfibers to washing machines is a reasonable and affordable step that could rapidly reduce the enormous quantities of microfibers in wastewater. The eventual solution will be reengineered textiles, which won’t shed, but it will take some time to develop them and move them into clothing supply chains. In the meantime, filters are the most effective way to tackle the problem.

Read the original article.

BY TIM NEWCOMB JAN 10, 2024

Researchers studying fossilized wood on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal recently discovered that an Early Miocene mangrove forest once covered the area.

A  volcanic flow likely buried and fossilized the trees in a single event.

Those trees represent a species of mangrove previously unknown to science.

Researchers studying on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal recently uncovered an entire lost ancient mangrove forest over 22 million years old, thanks to the discovery of the fossilized—and previously unknown to science—Sonneratioxylon barrocoloradoensis mangrove species. The team published a study documenting their discovery in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

According to the paper, adiometric analysis of the fossils dates the mangrove forest—including the 121 fossilized wood specimens located on the island—to the Aquitanian stage of Early Miocene. During this period, central Panama was part of a long and narrow peninsula connected to North America but and separated from South America, and was host to intense volcanic activity.

That volcanic activity was the likely demise of the forest. Sedimentary and rock analyses suggest that the fossilized trees once grew in either river or ocean environments until a single volcanic event buried the forest. 

Researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute said in the study that the wood anatomy of these mangroves indicates that they are similar to a type of mangrove native to Southeast Asia. The team named this newly discovered species after the island where it was found, and believe that S. barrocoloradoensis generally grew to a height of 82 feet tall—although, the tallest specimens could stretch upward of 131 feet, easily outpacing modern mangrove forests in terms of towering reach. 

The authors wrote that studying the site where the specimens were found has lead them to believe “that the fossil wood assemblage on Barro Colorado Island comprised a mangrove forest growing along the coast of the volcanic chain of central Panama.”

Mangrove forests are known to grow in tropical and subtropical locations. They can’t handle freezing temperatures, but the dense, tangly root systems cope well with fluctuating tides, making them a common site on coastlines and riverbanks. Salt water isn’t an issue for mangroves, which can filter the salt (along with other sediment) and thrive in some of the saltiest conditions available. 

Barro Colorado Island became a research hub after it formed in 1913—during the creation of Lake Gatun—as part of the Panama Canal construction. The 9-square-mile island is home to some of the oldest tropical research stations in the world, as the “rainforest-covered living laboratory” allows for unique opportunities to study biology, ecology, and animal behavior. 

Barro Colorado Island’s history already features over 100 years of research, but locating a previously unknown mangrove species and opening up an entirely new world of lost forests from over 22 million years ago is a real feather in its cap. 

BY SHANNON OSAKA

A new study finds that ‘nanoplastics’ are even more common than microplastics in bottled water

People are swallowing hundreds of thousands of microscopic pieces of plastic each time they drink a liter of bottled water, scientists have shown — a revelation that could have profound implications for human health.

A new paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found about 240,000 particles in the average liter of bottled water, most of which were “nanoplastics” — particles measuring less than one micrometer (less than one-seventieth the width of a human hair).

For the past several years, scientists have been looking for “microplastics,” or pieces of plastic that range from one micrometer to half a centimeter in length, and found them almost everywhere. The tiny shards of plastic have been uncovered in the deepest depths of the ocean, in the frigid recesses of Antarctic sea ice and in the human placenta. They spill out of laundry machines and hide in soils and wildlife. Microplastics are also in the food we eat and the water we drink: In 2018, scientists discovered that a single bottle of water contained, on average, 325 pieces of microplastics.

But researchers at Columbia University have now identified the extent to which nanoplastics also pose a threat.

“Whatever microplastic is doing to human health, I will say nanoplastics are going to be more dangerous,” said Wei Min, a chemistry professor at Columbia and one of the authors of the new paper.

Scientists have also found microplastics in tap water, but in smaller amounts.

Sherri Mason, a professor and director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pa., says plastic materials are a bit like skin — they slough off pieces into water or food or whatever substance they are touching.

“We know at this point that our skin is constantly shedding,” she said. “And this is what these plastic items are doing — they’re just constantly shedding.”

The typical methods for finding microplastics can’t be easily applied to finding even smaller particles, but Min co-invented a method that involves aiming two lasers at a sample and observing the resonance of different molecules. Using machine learning, the group was able to identify seven types of plastic molecules in a sample of three types of bottled water.

“There are some other techniques that have identified nanoplastics before,” said Naixin Qian, a PhD student in chemistry at Columbia and the first author of the new paper. “But before our study, people didn’t have a precise number of how many.”

“It’s really groundbreaking,” said Mason, who was not involved in the research but was one of the first researchers to identify plastics in bottled water. The new study, she says, shows how extensive nanoplastics are and provides a starting point to assess their health effects.

“Normal humans looking at a sample of water — if there’s visible plastic in it, they’ll be turned off,” she said. “But they don’t realize that it’s actually the invisible plastics present that are the biggest concern.”

The new study found pieces of PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is what most plastic water bottles are made of, and polyamide, a type of plastic that is present in water filters. The researchers hypothesized that this means plastic is getting into the water both from the bottle and from the filtration process.

Researchers don’t yet know how dangerous tiny plastics are for human health. In a large review published in 2019, the World Health Organization said there wasn’t enough firm evidence linking microplastics in water to human health, but described an urgent need for further research.

In theory, nanoplastics are small enough to make it into a person’s blood, liver and brain. And nanoplastics are likely to appear in much larger quantities than microplastics — in the new research, 90 percent of the plastic particles found in the sample were nanoplastics, and only 10 percent were larger microplastics.

Jill Culora, a spokeswoman for the International Bottled Water Association, said in an email that there “is both a lack of standardized methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers.”

Finding a connection between microplastics and health problems in humans is complicated — there are thousands of types of plastics, and over 10,000 chemicals used to manufacture them. But at a certain point, Mason said, policymakers and the public need to prepare for the possibility that the tiny plastics in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the clothes we wear have serious and dangerous effects.

“You still have a lot of people that, because of marketing, are convinced that bottled water is better,” Mason said. “But this is what you’re drinking in addition to that H2O.”

Shannon Osaka is a climate reporter covering policy, culture, and science for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was a climate reporter at the nonprofit environmental outlet Grist.

MATT SIMON

Up and down the Atlantic Coast, the land is steadily sinking, or subsiding. That’s destabilizing levees, roads, and airports, just as sea levels are rising.

Unless you’re sinking into quicksand, you might assume that the land beneath your feet is solid and unmoving. In actual fact, your part of the world may well be undergoing “subsidence,” which is where the ground collapses as sediments settle or when people over-extract groundwater. New York City is sinking, too, due to the weight of all those buildings pushing on the ground. In extreme cases, like in California’s agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet.

Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities.

In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence—due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors—for those communities and their infrastructure. Using satellite measurements, they have found that up to 74,000 square kilometers (29,000 square miles) of the Atlantic Coast are exposed to subsidence of up to 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) a year, affecting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. And over 3,700 square kilometers along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That’s an even faster change than sea level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year. (In the map below, warmer colors represent more subsidence, up to 6 millimeters.)

With each millimeter of subsidence, it gets easier for storm surges—essentially a wall of seawater, which hurricanes are particularly good at pushing onshore—to creep farther inland, destroying more and more infrastructure. “And it’s not just about sea levels,” says the study’s lead author, Leonard Ohenhen, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech. “You also have potential to disrupt the topography of the land, for example, so you have areas that can get full of flooding when it rains.”

A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper. The social forces are relentless, too, as more people around the world move to coastal cities, creating even more demand for groundwater. “There are processes that are sometimes even cyclic. For example, in summers you pump a lot more water, so land subsides rapidly in a short period of time,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and coauthor of the paper. “That causes large areas to subside below a threshold that leads the water to flood a large area.” When it comes to flooding, falling elevation of land is a tipping element that has been largely ignored by research so far, Shirzaei says.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, the land is sinking nearly a foot a year because of collapsing aquifers. Accordingly, within the next three decades, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be underwater. The city is planning a giant seawall to hold back the ocean, but it’ll be useless unless subsidence is stopped.

This new study warns that levees and other critical infrastructure along the Atlantic Coast are in similar danger. If the land were to sink uniformly, you might just need to keep raising the elevation of a levee to compensate. But the bigger problem is “differential subsidence,” in which different areas of land sink at different rates. “If you have a building or a runway or something that’s settling uniformly, it’s probably not that big a deal,” says Tom Parsons, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey who studies subsidence but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “But if you have one end that’s sinking faster than the other, then you start to distort things.”

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The researchers selected 10 levees on the Atlantic Coast and found that all were impacted by subsidence of at least 1 millimeter a year. That puts at risk something like 46,000 people, 27,000 buildings, and $12 billion worth of property. But they note that the actual population and property at risk of exposure behind the 116 East Coast levees vulnerable to subsidence could be two to three times greater. “Levees are heavy, and when they’re set on land that’s already subsiding, it can accelerate that subsidence,” says independent scientist Natalie Snider, who studies coastal resilience but wasn’t involved in the new research. “It definitely can impact the integrity of the protection system and lead to failures that can be catastrophic.”

The same vulnerability affects other infrastructure that stretches across the landscape. The new analysis finds that along the Atlantic Coast, between 77 and 99 percent of interstate highways and between 76 and 99 percent of primary and secondary roads are exposed to subsidence. (In the map above, you can see roads sinking at different rates across Hampton and Norfolk, Virginia.) Between 81 and 99 percent of railway tracks and 42 percent of train stations are exposed on the East Coast.

Below is New York’s JFK Airport—notice the red hot spots of high subsidence against the teal of more mild elevation change. The airport’s average subsidence rate is 1.7 millimeters a year (similar to the LaGuardia and Newark airports), but across JFK that varies between 0.8 and 2.8 millimeters a year, depending on the exact spot.

This sort of differential subsidence can also bork much smaller structures, like buildings, where one side might drop faster than another. “Even if that is just a few millimeters per year, you can potentially cause cracks along structures,” says Ohenhen.

The study finds that subsidence is highly variable along the Atlantic Coast, both regionally and locally, as different stretches have different geology and topography, and different rates of groundwater extraction. It’s looking particularly problematic for several communities, like Virginia Beach, where 451,000 people and 177,000 properties are at risk. In Baltimore, Maryland, it’s 826,000 people and 335,000 properties, while in NYC—in Queens, Bronx, and Nassau—that leaps to 5 million people and 1.8 million properties.

So there’s two components to addressing the problem of subsidence: Getting high-resolution data like in this study, and then pairing that with groundwater data. “Subsidence is so spatially variable,” says Snider. “Having the details of where groundwater extraction is really having an impact, and being able to then demonstrate that we need to change our management of that water, that reduces subsidence in the future.”

The time to act is now, Shirzaei emphasizes. Facing down subsidence is like treating a disease: You spend less money by diagnosing and treating the problem now, saving money later by avoiding disaster. “This kind of data and the study could be an essential component of the health care system for infrastructure management,” he says. “Like cancers—if you diagnose it early on, it can be curable. But if you are late, you invest a lot of money, and the outcome is uncertain.”

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN

CNN — In a trailblazing new study, researchers have discovered bottled water sold in stores can contain 10 to 100 times more bits of plastic than previously estimated — nanoparticles so infinitesimally tiny they cannot be seen under a microscope.

At 1,000th the average width of a human hair, nanoplastics are so teeny they can migrate through the tissues of the digestive tract or lungs into the bloodstream, distributing potentially harmful synthetic chemicals throughout the body and into cells, experts say.

One liter of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics, of which 90% were identified as nanoplastics and the rest were microplastics, according to the new study.

Microplastics are polymer fragments that can range from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) down to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometer). Anything smaller is a nanoplastic that must be measured in billionths of a meter.

“This study, I have to say, is exceedingly impressive. The body of work that they put into this was really quite profound … I would call it groundbreaking,” said Sherri “Sam” Mason, director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study.

The new finding reinforces long-held expert advice to drink tap water from glass or stainless steel containers to reduce exposure, Mason said. That advice extends to other foods and drinks packaged in plastic as well, she added.

“People don’t think of plastics as shedding but they do,” she said. “In almost the same way we’re constantly shedding skin cells, plastics are constantly shedding little bits that break off, such as when you open that plastic container for your store-bought salad or a cheese that’s wrapped in plastic.”

How many nanoplastics are there?

Mason was the coauthor of a 2018 study that first detected the existence of micro- and nanoplastics in 93% of samples of bottled water sold by 11 different brands in nine countries.

In that past study, Mason found each tainted liter of water held an average of 10 plastic particles wider than a human hair, along with 300 smaller particles. Five years ago, however, there was no way to analyze those tiny flecks or discover if there were more.

“It’s not that we didn’t know nanoplastics existed. We just couldn’t analyze them,” Mason explained.

In the new study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Columbia University presented a new technology that can see, count and analyze the chemical structure of nanoparticles in bottled water.

Instead of 300 per liter, the team behind the latest study found the actual number of plastic bits in three popular brands of water sold in the United States to be in between 110,000 and 370,000, if not higher. (The authors declined to mention which brands of bottled water they studied.)

However, the new technology was actually able to see millions of nanoparticles in the water, which could be “inorganic nanoparticles, organic particles and some other plastic particles not among the seven major plastic types we studied,” said coauthor and environmental chemist Beizhan Yan, an associate research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The innovative new techniques presented in the study open the door for further research to better understand the potential risks to human health, said Jane Houlihan, research director for Healthy Babies, Bright Futures, an alliance of nonprofits, scientists and donors committed to reducing babies’ exposures to neurotoxic chemicals, who was not involved in the study.

“They suggest widespread human exposures to minuscule plastic particles posing largely unstudied risks,” said Houlihan in an email. “Infants and young children may face the greatest risks, as their developing brains and bodies are often more vulnerable to impacts from toxic exposures.”

Dangers to human health

Nanoplastics are the most worrisome type of plastic pollution for human health, experts say. That’s because the minuscule particles can invade individual cells and tissues in major organs, potentially interrupting cellular processes and depositing endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as bisphenols, phthalates, flame retardants, per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, and heavy metals.

“All of those chemicals are used in the manufacturing of plastic, so if a plastic makes its way into us, it’s carrying those chemicals with it. And because the temperature of the body is higher than the outside, those chemicals are going to migrate out of that plastic and end up in our body,” Mason explained.

“The chemicals can be carried to your liver and your kidney and your brain and even make their way across the placental boundary and end up in an unborn child,” Mason said.

In studies of pregnant mice, researchers have found plastic chemicals in the brain, heart, liver, kidney and lungs of the developing baby 24 hours after the pregnant mother ingested or breathed in plastic particles, said study coauthor Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers University’s Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy in Piscataway, New Jersey.

“Micro and nanoplastics have been found in the human placenta at this point, Stapleton said. “They’ve been found in human lung tissues. They’ve been found in human feces; they’ve been found in human blood.”

In addition to the chemicals and toxic metals plastics may carry, another relatively unstudied area is whether the plastic polymer itself is also harming the body.

Read more here.

by Lori Valigra

Shampoo, dog treat packaging, cosmetics, pesticides, school supplies and swimsuits are among the nearly 1,000 brand-name products sold in Maine that contain so-called PFAS “forever chemicals,” according to an analysis of early industry reports made public for the first time today that show the prevalence of the chemicals.

“We suspected that PFAS use was widespread, and that was confirmed by these reports,” Mike Belliveau, president of the Portland-based nonprofit Defend Our Health, said. “What is alarming is that a lot of these products that contain PFAS will directly expose consumers in their homes and get washed down the drain, contaminating wastewater, or get tossed in the trash and leak out of landfills.”

The group of man-made chemicals has been linked to a range of harmful health effects when consumed.

Sixty national companies submitted information on PFAS chemicals contained in their products sold in the state to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection before the Maine Legislature extended the reporting deadline until Jan. 1, 2025. Maine had a first-in-the-nation law to require companies to report PFAS.

Defend Our Health requested the information submitted by the companies under a Freedom of Access Act request for public records. It obtained non-confidential information on 41 companies that it analyzed and provided to the Bangor Daily News. It still is awaiting information with redacted confidential information on the remaining 19 companies, Belliveau said.

PFAS, or per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, are chemicals used in products from water-repellent clothing to nonstick cookware and some cosmetics. The chemicals have water-, heat- and grease-resistant properties. The so-called “forever chemicals” break down slowly in the environment and are linked to health issues including kidney cancer.

The chemicals have been discovered at more than 70 farms and 540 household drinking wells in Maine so far, Belliveau said.

Most of the 41 companies identified between one to nine PFAS chemicals in their products. One example is PFOA, or per-fluorooctanoic acid, in Kinco work gloves. In addition, Duracell batteries, Panasonic refrigerator tubing and Heartland Farms dog treat packaging are among the commonly used items containing a range of PFAS chemicals.

The brand-name companies ranged in size from 10 employees with $5 million in annual revenue to 233,000 employees with $62 billion in annual revenue.

More companies are expected to report products sold in Maine containing PFAS by the revised deadline of Jan. 1, 2025. Under Maine law, all uses of PFAS in products sold in the state must be phased out by Jan. 1, 2030. The only exception is when a use is essential and lacks a reasonable alternative.

Belliveau said reporting PFAS use in products is a necessary first step to replacing the chemicals with safer alternatives. He said seven companies, including hair spray company Rogue & Co., shampoo company IGK and Dose of Colors cosmetics, have told the Maine DEP that they are working to reformulate their products and replace the harmful chemicals.

Consumers who want to be proactive and find out if the products they use contain PFAS should contact the manufacturers, Belliveau said.

Lori Valigra is an investigative environment reporter for the Bangor Daily News Maine Focus Team. She may be reached at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation and donations by BDN readers.

BY SCOTT DANCE

As a year of surprising global warmth came to a close, a record high annual average temperature was already assured. Now, some scientists are already speculating: 2024 could be even hotter.

After all, vast swaths of Earth’s oceans were record-warm for most of 2023, and it would take as many months for them to release that heat. An intense episode of the planet-warming El Niño climate pattern is nearing its peak, and the last time that happened, it pushed the planet to record warmth in 2016.

That suggests there will be no imminent slowdown in a surge of global warmth that has supercharged the decades-long trend tied to fossil fuel emissions.

It could be enough to, for the first time on an annual basis, push average planetary temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial, 19th century levels, according to Britain’s Met Office. The planet came closer than ever to that dreaded threshold in recent months, providing a first glimpse of a world where sustained levels of that heat would fuel new weather extremes.

But such climate trends can be difficult to predict with precision. After all, at the start of 2023, scientists predicted the year would end as one of the planet’s warmest on record. They didn’t expect it to set so many new precedents — and by record-wide margins.

“The fact that we are in uncharted territory, we don’t actually know what will happen next,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The El Niño factor

El Niño is known to raise planetary temperatures by as much as a few tenths of a degree Celsius, a decent margin for a globally averaged statistic. That’s because it’s associated with warmer-than-average surface temperatures across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, and those waters release heat and steam into the atmosphere.

El Niño typically lasts a year or less, peaking during the winter months and then fading in the spring. While scientists say no two El Niño events are exactly alike, each one brings some predictability to global climate patterns like few other planetary phenomena.

The current El Niño, which began in June, is considered strong and could peak as a historically potent episode some time in the coming weeks or months. It could be on par with a strong El Niño that began in early 2015, peaked that December, and faded by June 2016, on the way boosting 2016 to record warm global warmth.

If that pattern holds true this time, that could mean record warmth that has persisted over the past six months surges even higher in the first half of 2024.

One reason El Niño’s warming effect tends to crescendo in its latter months ties back to the effects it has on global weather. The abnormal sea surface warmth and storminess El Niño brings to the central and eastern Pacific has domino effects that lead to drought in other parts of the world, including Indonesia, southeast Asia and southern Africa.

“That sets the stage for higher than normal temperatures over land,” perhaps peaking around February, Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an email. “I expect this to be the case at least for the first 6 months of 2024.”

Whether that warming influence dominates all of 2024 depends on what comes after the current El Niño fades. That is likely to occur by June, returning the Pacific to what climate scientists call neutral conditions — the absence of either El Niño or its foil, La Niña.

Beyond that, it’s not clear if neutral conditions will persist, or if La Niña — known for planetary cooling — will develop. El Niño could even return.

So far, there is no clear hint of what could be ahead. While this El Niño has in some ways developed according to scientists’ textbook understanding of the phenomenon, in other ways it has been difficult to categorize. Some pattern changes that climate scientists would normally expect to see as El Niño winds down have not yet developed, Trenberth said.

“There are some aspects of what is going on that remain puzzling,” Trenberth said. “Climate change means all past analogs are not so reliable.”

Human-caused climate change has indeed dominated global trends: The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. A sure-to-be-record-hot 2023 and a potentially even hotter 2024 would stretch that streak to a decade.

Regardless of how the climate fluctuates this year, El Niño’s warmth across the Pacific will continue to influence global temperatures and weather patterns heavily, said Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a senior researcher at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

“It takes time for that energy to dissipate,” he said. “There’s persistence in the climate system.”