Oil executive Tom Ragsdale walked away from his old wells, making the pollution left behind the state of New Mexico’s problem. His tactics, however, are ubiquitous in the industry.

by Mark Olalde.

( ProPublica ) – In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received a memo with a dire warning: America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)

More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.

More than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged across the country. Many leak contaminants like brine, methane and benzene into waterways, farmland and neighborhoods. The industry has already left hundreds of thousands of old wells as orphans, meaning companies walked away, leaving taxpayers, government agencies or other drillers on the hook for cleanup.

America’s oil fields are increasingly split between a small number of wells producing record profits and everything else. Researchers estimate roughly 90% of wells are already dead or barely producing.

Consider the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oil field, stretching from West Texas across southeastern New Mexico.

“The Permian is the oil patch’s Alamo — that’s where it’s retreating to,” Regan Boychuk, a Canadian oil cleanup researcher, said of the oil industry. “That’s their last stand.”

Even here, many wells sit idle and in disrepair. It’s time to plug them, according to a growing chorus of researchers, environmentalists and industry representatives.

The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”

Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.

Should you want to become an oil executive and try this strategy yourself, here’s how it works …

As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

Next, start pumping and profiting.

As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.

Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.

Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that the number of environmental violations rises as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.

Pull any remaining profits before regulators hit you with violations and fines for your remaining wells that aren’t pumping and may be leaking.

Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, a study in California found that, after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.

Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining, carbon sequestration or the synthesis of hydrogen fuel — that require the wells to remain open.

When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.

“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”

When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, according to law firm Haynes Boone. (Industry groups estimate there are several thousand oil companies in the country.)

Regulators only require oil and gas companies to set aside tiny bonds that act like a security deposit on an apartment. Because you didn’t clean up your wells, you’ll lose that money, but it’s a fraction of the profits you’ve banked or the cost of the cleanup work. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that bonds typically equal less than 2% of actual cleanup costs.

And as you finalize your exit, the labyrinth of shell corporations you set up should act as corporate law intends, protecting you from future responsibility. Such companies, little more than stacks of paper, will be responsible for your liabilities, not you. Even if regulators know who is behind a company, it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate each layer of a business to go after individual executives.

“It’s the essence of corporate law,” Williams-Derry said.

Now that you’ve offloaded your wells, you’re free to start fresh — launch a new oil company and buy some of your old wells for pennies on the dollar, a proven option. Maybe you leave oil entirely — that’s also tried-and-true. Or become a vintner and open a winery just down the road from the wells you left as orphans — you wouldn’t be the first.

For its part, the oil industry downplays the so-called playbook and the country’s orphan well epidemic. “There’s a general trend, which is there are very few orphan wells,” said Kathleen Sgamma, who has been among oil companies’ most vocal proponents as president of the Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group. Plus, she said, companies’ bonds and states’ orphan well funds help pay for plugging.

But those tasked with addressing the reality of the country’s orphan wells disagree. “We have a welfare system for oil and gas. I hope you understand that,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, who oversees the state’s public lands. New Mexico has already documented more than 1,700 orphan wells across the state. “We have oil and gas welfare queens.”

In New Mexico, Garcia Richard is trying to hold accountable one of the myriad drillers that have followed key steps in the playbook, the oil company known as Siana.

Siana is made up of two related entities — Siana Oil and Gas Co. LLC and Siana Operating LLC — based in Midland and Conroe, Texas. The company operated 11 wells in southeastern New Mexico in the heart of the Permian Basin.

In reality, Siana is the corporate shield for a man named Tom Ragsdale. After he aggregated his few wells, he generated cash through a trickle of oil and gas production and set up a business injecting other companies’ wastewater into his wells to dispose of it. But the state worried that Ragsdale’s operations were polluting the environment and that he was refusing to pay royalties and rental fees he owed the state, according to State Land Office staff.

Ragsdale did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ProPublica and Capital & Main. He also did not appear for a pretrial conference after the state brought legal action against Siana, court records show, and a state court judge ruled against his companies.

Siana was responsible for at least 16 spills, according to New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data, mainly spilling what’s called produced water, a briny wastewater that comes to the surface alongside oil and gas. “Corrosion” and “Equipment Failure” were among the causes.

The State Land Office hired an engineering firm to study the damage. The firm produced a damning 201-page report in 2018, finding oil and salt contamination exceeding state limits at Siana’s most polluted site. At high enough levels, these substances can kill plants, harm wildlife and impact human health.

The State Land Office estimated that cleaning up that site alone would cost about $1 million.

In 2020, New Mexico won a judgment against Ragsdale’s companies that, with interest, is now worth more than $3.5 million. But it won’t cover the cleanup cost. Between a small bond and the judgment, the state has been able to recover a mere $50,000 or so from Siana and related entities.

When the state tried to collect the rest, Ragsdale placed Siana Oil and Gas in bankruptcy protection in June 2023. Although he listed the company as having millions in assets at the time of the bankruptcy, the company had only $20,500 in a bank account. Court records show Siana is responsible for between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities, including money owed to the state of New Mexico, other oil companies, various counties and others.

Stickers plastered around Siana’s drill sites — on which the company’s name is misspelled — provide phone numbers to call in case of leaks or other emergencies. None went to Ragsdale or Siana employees. A man named William Dean answered one number. He owned a local oil field services company called Dean’s Pumping that was contracted to work on Siana’s wells, but Ragsdale stopped paying its bills, ultimately owing his company tens of thousands of dollars, Dean said.

“He was trying to half-ass things,” Dean said of Ragsdale. “I don’t know what happened to Tom.”

Siana’s bankruptcy case is ongoing, but Ragsdale has been largely unresponsive even in those proceedings.

Siana is, Garcia Richard said, “an exemplar of how our system has failed.” Although he was very nearly free of his old wells, Ragsdale flouted the playbook and ignored the bankruptcy judge’s demands that he participate in the case. In an unusual move, the judge in late September issued a warrant for Ragsdale’s arrest to compel him to hand over certain data. The U.S. Marshals Service was investigating Ragsdale’s whereabouts but had not taken him into custody as of mid-December, according to an agency representative.

“Oil Corporations,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2024

The day after the judge issued the arrest warrant, the bankruptcy trustee filed a complaint alleging Ragsdale had committed fraud, siphoning about $2.4 million from Siana to purchase real estate in Houston.

That money could have gone toward cleaning up the mess left to New Mexico taxpayers.

ProPublica and Capital & Main visited Siana’s 11 wells in late 2023. At one drill site, methane leaked from a wellhead that had also stained the surrounding land black from spilled oil. The air was sour with the smell of toxic hydrogen sulfide. A nearby tank that held oil for processing was rusted through. Another had leaked an unidentified liquid. There appeared to be hoofprints where cattle had tracked through the polluted mud.

ProPublica and Capital & Main found oil spills at multiple Siana wells. At others, the idle pump jacks stood silent — corroded skeletons at the end of the line, the detritus of another run through the playbook.

Efforts to reform the system that has shielded oil companies from liability have been haphazard. When the federal government rewrote its rule setting bond levels on federal public land earlier this year, a simple math error meant the government would ask oil companies to set aside around $400 million less in bonds than it would’ve otherwise. And when states have tried to pass reforms, they’ve been stymied by state legislators’ and regulators’ chummy relationships with the industry.

As an ever-greater share of wells go offline and the economy transitions to cleaner forms of energy, policymakers face a choice: Do they focus attention on propping up or cleaning up the industry?

Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance gives voice to one path forward. “Any time a well goes into an orphan status, it’s not a good thing,” Sgamma said, yet her group has been instrumental in killing efforts to address the orphan well epidemic and the oil industry’s contributions to climate change. Her organization is suing to halt the federal rule that sought to bring bonding levels closer to true plugging costs.

Sgamma co-authored the energy section of Project 2025, the conservative policy paper with deep ties to the first Trump administration that lays out policy priorities for a conservative White House. The plan would “Stop the war on oil and natural gas,” reopen undeveloped habitat from Alaska to Colorado for drilling, increase the number of sales for oil leases on public lands and shrink federal environmental agencies. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated this closely aligns with his vision for pumping America’s “liquid gold.” He has begun staffing his administration with pro-oil and gas figures.

The future for which Sgamma is fighting sees a resilient American oil and gas industry, able to “take a lot of punches” while continuing to grow unabated.

Or there’s the future Garcia Richard, who oversees New Mexico’s public land, envisions. She has paused the leasing of public land to drillers until the Legislature forces oil companies to pay state taxpayers higher royalties that reflect fair market rates. She directed her staff to aggressively pursue companies like Siana. And her office is preparing to raise required bonding levels. As she talked about this work, she held up the literal rubber stamp that imparts the State Land Office’s seal on documents, suggesting that’s not how business is done anymore. She also held up a small notebook where she tracks the numerous companies her office is pursuing for polluting the state’s land and water.

In her future, Garcia Richard said, oil drillers wouldn’t behave like Siana and Ragsdale. “A good-acting company is a company that understands there’s a cost of doing business that shouldn’t be borne by the landowner, shouldn’t be borne by the taxpayers,” she said. But in the modern American oil industry, she added, the playbook and the still-burning fuse of the cleanup time bomb represent little more than “Wild West behavior.”

Mark Olalde is a reporter at ProPublica covering the environment in the Southwest.

mark.olalde@propublica.org

(The Conversation) – Earlier this week, the mining magnate Andrew Forrest made headlines calling for a global “polymer premium” – or plastic tax – to be placed on every tonne of newly manufactured plastics. A tax like this could form part of the Global Plastic Treaty being hammered out right now in Busan, South Korea. In fact, a treaty aimed at stopping plastic waste will have to have strong measures such as a plastic tax or a cap on plastic production to shift the status quo.

In economics, taxing things you don’t want should mean fewer get made. What Forrest is pitching is a way to curb the seemingly unstoppable rise in plastic production and tackle the plastic waste crisis at its source. While we may think recycling is all we need to solve the plastic waste problem, it’s nowhere near enough. Plastic is steadily choking seas and rivers, while toxic microplastics damage our health.

Forrest isn’t the first. Environmental groups and think tanks are also calling for a global tax on plastic producers and importers.

Many plastic products are designed to last for a long time. But manufacturers are increasingly churning out cheap plastics such as single-use items and food packaging which almost inevitably become waste.

Introducing a tax would add an additional cost to making virgin (new) plastic, to deter manufacturers from producing and selling as much non-recyclable and non-reuseable products as possible. If introduced, they would go some way to cut the overproduction of plastic.

What would a plastic treaty do?

Over this week and next, negotiators from more than 170 United Nations member states are working towards a Global Plastic Treaty at the fifth and final set of talks.

Work on this treaty has progressed rapidly. It was only in 2022 that 175 nations voted to adopt a historic resolution to negotiate a legally binding international treaty to end plastic pollution. In recognition of the danger posed by unchecked plastic production, nations set an accelerated timeline. If a treaty is agreed, it could come into effect as soon as 2025.

It would operate much like the legally-binding Paris Agreement on climate change, which requires nations to regularly report their greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to cut them. A Global Plastics Treaty would include binding measures requiring signatories to commit to action on plastic pollution. But exactly what will be covered and how is yet to be decided.

Nations have already agreed on measures to improve waste management and recycling as well as new design standards for plastic products.

While positive, the hardest part is yet to come.

These final negotiations wraps up on Sunday. Still to come is a decision on the most contentious issue: whether to introduce limits on how much plastic a company can produce. Plastic industry lobbyists are arguing strongly against any cap to plastic production.

Recycling isn’t enough

Plastic pollution has been a problem for decades. But to date, our efforts to respond have hardly made a dint. Today, there are about 7 billion tonnes of plastic waste in the world. So far, just 9% has been recycled.

The rest ends up burned in incinerators, in landfills, or in rivers, seas and forests. Plastics can also damage our health in many different ways.

Plastic production doubled between 2000 and 2019, reaching 460 million tonnes a year. By 2060, production is projected to almost triple that figure, to 1.2 billion tonnes a year.

AI-generated Image by Friedrich Teichmann from Pixabay

An increasing proportion of plastic production is single-use packaging, which is cheap to make and almost impossible to recycle.

Researchers have found recycling and waste management will only cut plastic pollution by 7% in the long term. These tools won’t be enough.

Plastic taxes are not new

In 2021, the European Union introduced a levy on non-recycled plastic packaging waste created by its member states. Set at €0.80 (A$1.30) per kilo, the cost is borne by national governments, who in turn can pass the cost on to producers. The levy is expected to generate A$11.3 billion per year when fully implemented.

Nations in Europe have already begun to pass on the cost. Last year, Spain imposed a tax on producers and importers of single use plastic packaging, while Hungary expanded an existing scheme to include plastic products. Earlier this year, Bulgaria, Portugal and the United Kingdom introduced their own fees for single-use plastics.

Because these taxes are new, it’s difficult to fully assess their impact. But over time, these incentives should reduce plastic pollution and boost government revenue, which can be used to drive better recycling and resource recovery.

Australia’s government is consulting on new standards for packaging in a bid to phase out dangerous chemicals and boost use of recycled plastics, while some state and territory governments have introduced bans on single-use plastics. But plastic waste researchers and environmental advocates argue that stronger measures are needed to curb plastic waste.

Taxing single-use plastic packaging in Australia could raise $1.5 billion, according to one study. These funds could be used to accelerate progress on plastic pollution.

A global treaty needs teeth

Over the last 70 years, plastics have become ubiquitous. But the convenience of cheap plastics comes at a cost to our health and the health of the natural world.

Tackling plastic pollution will take concerted effort and financing to reduce plastic production.

As Andrew Forrest and others point out, taxing virgin plastic could discourage overproduction of plastics and encourage more investment in recyclable and reusable plastic products.

But for plastic taxes to work, they need to be widely adopted. That could be as part of the Global Plastic Treaty, or done on a national level. Plastic taxes could work as an alternative to capping plastic production, if negotiators can’t reach agreement in Busan.

Plastic taxes are not a silver bullet. We would still need a suite of measures addressing plastics throughout their lifecycle, from design and production to recycling and disposal. But putting a price on plastic would help.

Amelia Leavesley, Research Fellow in Urban Sustainability, The University of Melbourne

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

Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable.

Residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, the nation’s data-center epicenter, have filed dozens of complaints about an especially loud facility located in the town of Leesburg. People living as much as three miles from the center compared the noise from its giant cooling fans to the sounds of an airplane engine, a freight train, a huge leaf blower, or a helicopter hovering overhead, day and night.

Attorneys representing a group of Williston, North Dakota, homeowners argued last December that noise pollution from the nearby Atlas Power Data Center “is a continual invasion of their homes, their health, and their North Dakota way of life. They are now virtually shut-ins in the slice of North Dakota they once called their own.” In April, Gladys Anderson of Bono, Arkansas, told reporters that a nearby cryptocurrency-mining data center was “like torture, like a form of military-grade torture.” Her neighbor complained, “It’s caused problems for me with my hearing, my blood pressure, with the sweetheart where she gets migraine headaches.”

Chicago-based airline pilot Joshua Zhang — someone who (I’m betting) knows a thing or two about loud noise — told CBS News in 2021 that a new data center in his Printers’ Row neighborhood whined like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that never shuts off. “I try to fly as much as I can to stay away from here,” he said. “I can’t really sleep well… and I have to operate a flight.” In other words, the data center’s ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at… O’Hare Airport.

Noise Makes Us Sick and We’re Sick of Noise

The recent, rapid proliferation of data centers has been due, at least in part, to the similarly rapid growth of two types of enterprises: cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI). Those voracious wasters of electricity were unasked-for inventions that filled largely nonexistent human needs. And they’re amplifying the very real problem of noise pollution.  

Crypto and AI illustrate a larger issue. An all-out effort to curb climate change will require deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, which will, in turn, require more frugal use of all forms of energy. And if that happens (as it should), it will have profound repercussions throughout society. As one of the more welcome consequences, our now-cacophonous world is likely to become easier on the ears.

With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.

The severe impact of noise pollution on both mental and physical health is well documented. Hearing impairment is the most obvious malady it causes. The World Health Organization (WHO) finds that noise pollution severely disrupts our quality of life in other ways, too, raising the risk of heart disease, childhood cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, and general annoyance. WHO notes that while

“. . . annoyance is not normally classified as a health effect, it certainly affects well-being and therefore is considered to fall within the WHO definition of health as being ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.’ More importantly, however, it is the effect of noise that most lay people are aware of and concerned about.”

And annoyance can be a gateway to much worse, to “feelings of disturbance, aggravation, dissatisfaction, concern, bother, displeasure, harassment, irritation, nuisance, vexation, exasperation, discomfort, uneasiness, distress, hate, etc.” You might think I got that quote from a thesaurus, but, no, it’s from a study published in the journal Noise and Health. Any person living near a data center or other source of loud, continuous noise can, I expect, attest to having experienced most (or all) of those feelings. And it’s well known that such stresses can lead to physiological health problems.

Buy the Book

When it comes to making people miserable, keep in mind that not all noises are created equal. The roar from data centers, vehicle traffic, commercial lawn-care operations, and other notorious disturbers of the peace is rich in low-pitched audible frequencies that travel much further than others and can even pass through walls. Such low tones also irritate us more, even when they aren’t all that loud. Consequently, and unfortunately, people complaining about their exposure to noise from data centers or other sources of low-frequency noise are all too often dismissed as hypochondriacs. In a recent, comprehensive article on noise pollution in the Atlantic magazine, Bianca Bosker told a gripping tale of how people in Chandler, Arizona, suffered for years as their complaints about data center noise were casually dismissed by local authorities.

The Cruelty Is the Point

For those of us not living near a data center, road traffic may be the most pervasive, day-to-day source of unhealthful low-frequency noise. In the European Union, for example, 113 million people, or 20% percent of the population, live with noise pollution from road traffic that’s loud enough to raise risks of heart disease and heart failure. The risk of developing diabetes, obesity, anxiety, depression, and of course, sleep disturbance also increases as traffic noise gets louder.

Of course, we produce traffic noise collectively and most, but not all, of us hate it. In an April essay entitled “What is Noise?,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross observed that “if you elect to hear something, it is not noise, even if most people might deem it unspeakably horrible. If you are forced to hear something, it is noise, even if most people might deem it ineffably gorgeous.” Extra-loud vehicles, particularly en masse, richly illustrate Ross’s observation.

In recent decades, American pickup trucks and SUVs have grown steadily larger and heavier, with towering front ends and armoring that create a road-ruling mystique. Increasingly, to further satisfy consumer demand for big, intimidating vehicles, automakers equip many of them with high-decibel engines, turbochargers, and thunderous exhaust systems. Drivers all too regularly dial the volume up several more notches with muffler modifications that are often illegal. The automakers’ economic motivation for offering big, loud vehicles is clear ($$$), but why exactly do their customers want them? The deafening din emanating from those trucks has distinct political undertones, but there may also be something deeper going on.

A 2023 study published in the journal Current Issues in Personality Psychology sheds some light on this. The researcher interviewed 529 people, split almost equally between the sexes, about their attitudes toward noisy vehicles. Then, using questionnaires, she evaluated the subjects for four “dark” personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. It turned out (surprise!) that men liked loud vehicles significantly more than women did. Across both sexes, those who expressed greater fondness for such vehicles also tended to score higher for two dark personality traits: psychopathy and sadism. The researcher drily observed that the results made perfect sense:

“Psychopathy reflects an up-close cruelty, whereas sadism includes viewing the harm to others from a distance… Modifying a muffler to make a car louder is disturbing to pedestrians, other drivers, and animals at a distance, meeting the sadism component, as well as startling when [the victim is] up close at intersections, meeting the psychopathy component.

The author of that study is not a medical professional (nor am I); still, it’s not exactly illogical to consider guys who alter their trucks to produce brain-rattling noise psychopaths. I’m not a lawyer either, but it still seems to me that labeling such practices a form of reckless indifference to human well-being is anything but unreasonable.  

Quietness Should Be a Right, Not a Privilege

For decades, the environmental justice movement has been fighting a longstanding American tradition of locating dirty, dangerous industries and activities in low-income, racialized communities. This is a problem that arises with every environmental issue, and noise is no exception. Alex Ross recognized that in his “What Is Noise?” essay when he observed, “Silence is a luxury of the rich… For the rest of society, noise is an index of struggle.”  

In neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status and/or large Indigenous, Asian, Black, or Latino populations, residents endure greater exposure to noise pollution, especially in areas where informal racial segregation is more severe. Not surprisingly, a separate study found that the same demographic groups experience highly disproportionate levels of annoyance from noise caused by road traffic or aircraft.

Consider it a certain irony then that, despite being exposed to less noise pollution, white Americans are subject to significantly higher rates of hearing loss than Black Americans — and it’s unclear why. Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post complicated matters further when he noted that there’s also a political disparity: the higher the share of Republicans in a state or county, the greater the rate of hearing loss. He couldn’t fully explain this as a result of populations in redder states being generally whiter and older. There had to be some other factor. When Van Dam looked further, he found one that made a big difference in the prevalence of hearing loss: politically redder areas have higher rates of recreational firearm ownership than bluer areas, with lots more hunting and gun-range target practice — another kind of noise pollution entirely.

No Peace, No Quiet

The U.S. military also has lots of guns, as well as an enormous climate footprint. A dramatic downsizing of our war-making capacity (and the staggering Pentagon budgets that go with it) — badly needed for both humanitarian and ecological reasons — would have the salutary side-effect of shrinking one of our major sources of noise pollution and hearing loss.

It should come as no surprise that researchers in a wide range of countries have found that hearing loss is more common among military personnel than in the general population. Among American service members, almost 15% suffer hearing impairment. Hearing loss is one of the most common health problems of veterans, especially those who served in special forces units (where it’s twice as prevalent as elsewhere in the armed forces). The exposure of those in such units to large-caliber weapon fire, urban combat training, and the like clearly has a lot to do with that.

In military operations, jet aircraft are the most intense source of both greenhouse-gas emissions and noise pollution. Jets account for almost 80% of the military’s fuel consumption. Their noise output is not as precisely quantified, but recent research in a study on civilian impacts around Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State found that, in the county where the base is located, two-thirds of the resident population were exposed to noise levels that could have negative health effects. One-fifth suffered high levels of annoyance and 9% were “highly sleep disturbed.” Worse yet, according to that study, “the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of the Swinomish Reservation [located northeast of the airfield] was extremely vulnerable to health risks, with nearly 85 percent of residents being exposed.”

In Salina, Kansas, where Priti Gulati Cox and I live, we have less frequent but highly immersive experiences with military noise pollution every time the curiously named “Jaded Thunder joint exercise” comes to town. In part of that “exercise,” pilots from the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy take off from a nearby airfield in fighter jets and fly low over our city of 50,000. The noise hits you suddenly, like a roundhouse punch. It’s like nothing I’ve heard or felt elsewhere.  My own reaction to such overwhelming noise levels is similar to those found in survey responses from several residents of Madison, Wisconsin, who hear fighter jet noise much more routinely than we Salinans do. As one of them put it: “Everything I’m doing comes to a halt… my entire body tenses up and my heart starts racing… utterly jarring… impossible to make out dialogue… impossible to just continue any activity… reminds me of every innocent soul killed in a bombing by my home country.” Finally, there was simply this: “Annoyed.”

Cooler Means Quieter

America was getting louder before the rise of data centers, but now it’s getting louder faster. Unfortunately, the research on that is sparse, but it’s still a reasonable conclusion to draw. In her article, Bianca Bosker pointed out another intriguing indicator of our rising noise problem. Fire-engine sirens today are designed to be more than twice as loud as those of the 1970s, just so they’ll be audible above the rising din of our cities and suburbs. And keep in mind that they’re eight times as loud as the sirens of 1912.

Climate mitigation is also noise mitigation. To avoid baking the Earth, governments must quickly phase out the use of oil, gas, and coal. With a slimmed-down energy supply, economies will need to direct fuels and electricity toward uses that meet more essential needs. Crypto and AI are not among such uses, nor can we afford to keep streets and highways crammed with gas- and diesel-guzzling private vehicles. For those and many other reasons, count on one thing: strong efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will also have striking beneficial side effects, including more peace and quiet. And that should be music to our ears. 

Copyright 2024 Stan Cox

via Tomdispatch.com

You would be hard-pressed to find a corner of the world free from microplastics, plastic particles measuring less than five millimetres. They contaminate our drinking water, accumulate in the food we eat and have been found in the human body, including in blood, organs, placenta, semen and breast milk.

In April, delegates from across the world came together in Ottawa for the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop a legally binding international treaty on plastic pollution. The meeting offered a unique opportunity to identify strategies for addressing the human and environmental health impacts of plastics, including microplastics.

But do we really know what it would take to mitigate the rising amounts of microplastics in the environment?

This article is part of our series Our lakes: their secrets and challenges. This summer, The Conversation and La Conversation invite you to take a fascinating dip in our lakes. With magnifying glasses, microscopes and diving goggles, our scientists scrutinize the biodiversity of our lakes and the processes that unfold in them, and tell us about the challenges they face. Don’t miss our articles on these incredibly rich bodies of water!

In the Great Lakes, plastic pollution along the shorelines poses a major challenge: 86 per cent of litter collected on Great Lakes beaches is either partially or completely composed of plastic. This is worrisome, given the lakes supply 40 million people with drinking water and represent a combined GDP of US$6 trillion. Yet, recent studies show levels of microplastics reaching up to thousands of particles per cubic metre in some areas of the lakes.

Mismanaged plastic waste

Improving waste management alone is unlikely to address microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Consider one of the most common pieces of litter on a beach: a 500 ml plastic bottle. If that bottle is not picked up and placed in a landfill or recycled, over the years it will break down into microplastics; the complete disintegration of the bottle into 100 micrometre size particles would produce 25 million microplastics.

Based on reported concentrations of microplastics and water flow rates of the Great Lakes, we can estimate the yearly amounts of plastic that need to be entering the lakes to match the concentrations of microplastics currently observed.

For Lake Superior, this adds up to the same mass of plastic contained in 1,000 bottles. But Lake Superior is the cleanest of the Great Lakes. For Lakes Huron, Michigan, Erie and Ontario, the corresponding estimates are 3,000, two million, 18,000, and nine million bottles, respectively.

According to the Canadian government’s own estimation, Canadians living in the Great Lakes Basin throw away more than 1.5 million tons of plastic waste each year, equivalent to 64 billion 500 ml bottles. If we include the United States, the total amount of plastic waste in the Great Lakes Basin rises to 21 million tons per year (or 821 billion 500 ml bottles).

For Canada and the U.S., the fraction of mismanaged plastic waste that leaks into the environment because it is not recycled, incinerated or landfilled is estimated to be between four and seven per cent.

According to our calculations, this means that it would take less than 0.001 per cent of the total mass of plastics consumed annually within the Great Lakes Basin to generate the number of microplastics present in the lakes. In other words, just 0.02 per cent of the mismanaged plastic waste already explains the microplastic concentrations in the Great Lakes — the other 99.8 per cent ending up as macro- to micro-sized litter in soils, waterways, ponds, beaches and biota.

What these calculations imply is that the shedding of even very minor, and arguably unavoidable, microplastic particles over the lifetime of a product can lead to significant accumulations of environmental microplastics, including in areas far removed from their source.

While better plastic waste management can help alleviate microplastics pollution, we should not count on it to bring down the microplastics concentrations in all five Great Lakes.

Curbing pollution

Microplastic pollution comes not only from plastic litter in the environment, but also from plastic that is thrown in the trash bin. Even long-lived plastics, such as those that are used in the construction industry, shed microplastics through natural wear and tear.

Once they enter an ecosystem, microplastics become extremely difficult and expensive to clean up. Recycling is the best option currently available, but even this process has been shown to produce microplastics.

At present, less than 10 per cent of plastic is recycled worldwide. With plastic production predicted to triple by 2060, achieving a fully circular plastic economy — where all plastic produced is recycled without shedding microplastic particles — faces huge economic, social, environmental and technological challenges.

And it would take many years to establish such a system, all while microplastic pollution continues to worsen. If we are serious about reducing microplastics concentrations in the environment, the reasonable course of action would be to start reducing plastic production and consumption now.

Lewis Alcott, Lecturer in Geochemistry, University of Bristol; Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Research Associate Professor, Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo; Nancy Goucher, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist, University of Waterloo; Philippe Van Cappellen, Professor of Biogeochemistry and Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate in Ecohydrology, University of Waterloo, and Stephanie Slowinski, Research Biogeochemist, University of Waterloo

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

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Northern Michigan Environmental Action Video: “Microplastics in the Great Lakes with Art Hirsch”

( ProPublica ) – Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.

It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.

Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.

Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.

Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.

While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster, but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones and be chemically recycled again and again.

So when three companies used ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology to successfully conjure up that fruit cup, they announced it to the world.

“This is a significant milestone,” said Printpack, which turned the plastic into cups. The fruit supplier Pacific Coast Producers called it “the most important initiative a consumer-packaged goods company can pursue.”

“ExxonMobil is supporting the circularity of plastics,” the August 2023 news release said, citing a buzzword that implies an infinite loop of using, recycling and reusing.

They were so proud, I hoped they would tell me all about how they made the cup, how many of them existed and where I could buy one.

Let’s take a closer look at that Printpack press release, which uses convoluted terms to describe the recycled plastic in that fruit cup:

“30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular”

“mass balance free attribution”

It’s easy to conclude the cup was made with 30% recycled plastic — until you break down the numerical sleight of hand that props up that number.

It took interviews with a dozen academics, consultants, environmentalists and engineers to help me do just that.

Stick with me as I unravel it all.

So began my long — and, well, circular — pursuit of the truth at a time when it really matters.

This year, nearly all of the world’s countries are hammering out a United Nations treaty to deal with the plastic crisis. As they consider limiting production, the industry is making a hard push to shift the conversation to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition of what it means to recycle.

It’s been selling governments on chemical recycling, with quite a bit of success. American and European regulatorshave spent tens of millions subsidizing pyrolysis facilities. Half of all U.S. states have eased air pollution rules for the process, which has been found to release carcinogens like benzene and dioxins and give off more greenhouse gases than making plastic from crude oil.

Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.

Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.

Not now. Maybe not ever.

In traditional recycling, plastic is turned into tiny pellets or flakes, which you can melt again and mold back into recycled plastic products.

Even in a real-life scenario, where bottles have labels and a little bit of juice left in them, most of the plastic products that go into the process find new life.

The numbers are much lower for pyrolysis.

CBS Sunday Morning video: “Critics call out plastics industry over recycling ‘fraud'”

It’s “very, very, very, very difficult” to break down plastic that way, said Steve Jenkins, vice president of chemicals consulting at Wood Mackenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. “The laws of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.”

Waste is heated until it turns into oil. Part of that oil is composed of a liquid called naphtha, which is essential for making plastic.

There are two ingredients in the naphtha that recyclers want to isolate: propylene and ethylene — gases that can be turned into solid plastics.

To split the naphtha into different chemicals, it’s fed into a machine called a steam cracker. Less than half of what it spits out becomes propylene and ethylene.

This means that if a pyrolysis operator started with 100 pounds of plastic waste, it can expect to end up with 15-20 pounds of reusable plastic. Experts told me the process can yield less if the plastic used is dirty or more if the technology is particularly advanced.

I reached out to several companies to ask how much new plastic their processes actually yield, and none provided numbers. The American Chemistry Council, the nation’s largest plastic lobby, told me that because so many factors impact a company’s yield, it’s impossible to estimate that number for the entire industry.

With mechanical recycling, it’s hard to make plastic that’s 100% recycled; it’s expensive to do, and the process degrades plastic. Recycled pellets are often combined with new pellets to make stuff that’s 25% or 50% recycled, for example.

But far less recycled plastic winds up in products made through pyrolysis.

That’s because the naphtha created using recycled plastic is contaminated. Manufacturers add all kinds of chemicals to make products bend or keep them from degrading in the sun.

Recyclers can overpower them by heavily diluting the recycled naphtha. With what, you ask? Nonrecycled naphtha made from ordinary crude oil!

This is the quiet — and convenient — part of the industry’s revolutionary pyrolysis method: It relies heavily on extracting fossil fuels. At least 90% of the naphtha used in pyrolysis is fossil fuel naphtha. Only then can it be poured into the steam cracker to separate the chemicals that make plastic.

So at the end of the day, nothing that comes out of pyrolysis physically contains more than 10% recycled material (though experts and studies have shown that, in practice, it’s more like 5% or 2%).

Ten percent doesn’t look very impressive. Some consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainability, so companies use a form of accounting called mass balance to inflate the recycled-ness of their products. It’s not unlike offset schemes I’ve uncovered that absolve refineries of their carbon emissions and enable mining companies to kill chimpanzees. Industry-affiliated groups like the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification write the rules. (ISCC didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

To see how this works, let’s take a look at what might happen to a batch of recycled naphtha. Let’s say the steam cracker splits the batch into 100 pounds of assorted ingredients.

There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further:

A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all.

As long as you avoid double counting, Jenkins told me, you can attribute the full value of recycled naphtha to the products that will make the most money. Companies need that financial incentive to recoup the costs of pyrolysis, he said.

But it’s hard to argue that this type of marketing is transparent. Consumers aren’t going to parse through the caveats of a 33% recycled claim or understand how the green technology they’re being sold perpetuates the fossil fuel industry. I posed the critiques to the industry, including environmentalists’ accusations that mass balance is just a fancy way of greenwashing.

The American Chemistry Council told me it’s impossible to know whether a particular ethylene molecule comes from pyrolysis naphtha or fossil fuel naphtha; the compounds produced are “fungible” and can be used for multiple products, like making rubber, solvents and paints that would reduce the amount of new fossil fuels needed. Its statement called mass balance a “well-known methodology” that’s been used by other industries including fair trade coffee, chocolate and renewable energy.

Legislation in the European Union already forbids free attribution, and leaders are debating whether to allow other forms of mass balance. U.S. regulation is far behind that, but as the Federal Trade Commission revises its general guidelines for green marketing, the industry is arguing that mass balance is crucial to the future of advanced recycling. “The science of advanced recycling simply does not support any other approach because the ability to track individual molecules does not readily exist,” said a comment from ExxonMobil.

If you think navigating the ins and outs of pyrolysis is hard, try getting your hands on actual plastic made through it.

It’s not as easy as going to the grocery store. Those water bottles you might see with 100% recycled claims are almost certainly made through traditional recycling. The biggest giveaway is that the labels don’t contain the asterisks or fine print typical of products made through pyrolysis, like “mass balance,” “circular” or “certified.”

When I asked about the fruit cup, ExxonMobil directed me to its partners. Printpack didn’t respond to my inquiries. Pacific Coast Producers told me it was “engaged in a small pilot pack of plastic bowls that contain post-consumer content with materials certified” by third parties, and that it “has made no label claims regarding these cups and is evaluating their use.”

I pressed the American Chemistry Council for other examples.

“Chemical recycling is a proven technology that is already manufacturing products, conserving natural resources, and offering the potential to dramatically improve recycling rates,” said Matthew Kastner, a media relations director. His colleague added that much of the plastic made via pyrolysis is “being used for food- and medical-grade packaging, oftentimes not branded.”

They provided links to products including a Chevron Phillips Chemical announcement about bringing recycled plastic food wrapping to retail stores.

“For competitive reasons,” a Chevron spokesperson declined to discuss brand names, the product’s availability or the amount produced.

In another case, a grocery store chain sold chicken wrapped in plastic made by ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis process. The producers told me they were part of a small project that’s now discontinued.

In the end, I ran down half a dozen claims about products that came out of pyrolysis; each either existed in limited quantities or had its recycled-ness obscured with mass balance caveats.

Then this April, nearly eight months after I’d begun my pursuit, I could barely contain myself when I got my hands on an actual product.

I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)

This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.

Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the environmental justice network Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as promised.

“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every reporter in the world” would get a tour.

If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?

The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste stream.

Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.

But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this more polluting, less efficient process?

I asked ExxonMobil how much post-consumer plastic it was actually using. Catie Tuley, a media relations adviser, said it depends on what’s available. “At the end of the day, advanced recycling allows us to divert plastic waste from landfills and give new life to plastic waste.”

I posed the same question to several other operators. A company in Europe told me it uses “mixed post-consumer, flexible plastic waste” and does not recycle pre-consumer waste.

But this spring at an environmental journalism conference, an American Chemistry Council executive confirmed the industry’s preference for clean plastic as he talked about an Atlanta-based company and its pyrolysis process. My colleague Sharon Lerner asked whether it was sourcing curbside-recycled plastic for pyrolysis.

If Nexus Circular had a “magic wand,” it would, he acknowledged, but right now that kind of waste “isn’t good enough.” He added, “It’s got tomatoes in it.”

(Nexus later confirmed that most of the plastic it used was pre-consumer and about a third was post-consumer, including motor oil containers sourced from car repair shops and bags dropped off at special recycling centers.)

Clean, well-sorted plastic is a valuable commodity. If the chemical recycling industry grows, experts told me, those companies could end up competing with the far more efficient traditional recycling.

To spur that growth, the American Chemistry Council is lobbying for mandates that would require more recycled plastic in packaging; it wants to make sure that chemically recycled plastic counts. “This would create market-driven demand signals,” Kastner told me, and ease the way for large-scale investment in new chemical recycling plants.

I asked Jenkins, the energy industry analyst, to play out this scenario on a larger scale.

Were all of these projects adding up? Could the industry conceivably make enough propylene and ethylene through pyrolysis to replace much of our demand for new plastic?

He looked three years into the future, using his company’s latest figures on global pyrolysis investment, and gave an optimistic assessment.

At best, the world could replace 0.2% of new plastic churned out in a year with products made through pyrolysis.

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(The Conversation) – As wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza, another location ravaged by conflict is taking steps to implement a historic peace agreement. From the mid-1960s through 2016, Colombia was torn by conflict between the government, leftist guerrilla movements and right-wing paramilitary groups. Now the government and rebels are working to carry out a sweeping accord that addresses many critical sectors, including environmental damages and restoration.

University of Notre Dame researchers Richard Marcantonio and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez study peace and conflict issues, including their effects on the environment. They currently are advising negotiations between the Colombian government and several rebel factions over wartime damage to soil, water and other natural resources. They explain that while Colombia’s transition from war to peace has been difficult, the accord offers a model for addressing the ravages of war in places such as Gaza and Ukraine.

Is it common for peace settlements to address environmental harm?

Few agreements include environmental provisions, and even fewer see them carried out, even though research shows that many drivers of conflict can be directly or indirectly related to the environment.

We work with a research program at the University of Notre Dame called the Peace Accords Matrix, which monitors the implementation of comprehensive peace accords in 34 countries worldwide. Only 10 of the accords have natural resource management provisions agreements, and these typically have not triggered major steps to protect the environment.

How is the Colombia accord different?

Colombia’s is seen as the most comprehensive peace accord that has been signed to date. It considers issues ranging from security to social justice and political participation, in great detail.

The accord acknowledges that a peaceful postwar society requires not only respect for human rights but also “protection of the environment, respect for nature and its renewable and nonrenewable resources and biodiversity.” More than 20% of the commitments in the agreement have an environmental connection.

They fall into four main categories:

– Adapting and responding to climate change

– Preserving natural resources and habitats

– Protecting environmental health through measures such as access to clean water

– Process issues, such as ensuring that communities can participate in decisions about rural programs and resource management

There also are gaps. For example, many protected areas have been deforested for ranching and coca production in the postaccord period. And there are no provisions addressing toxic pollution, an issue other agreements also neglect.

Often there are power vacuums during transitions between war and peace, when government agencies are working to reestablish their operations. Natural resources and environmental health need protection during these phases.

In Sierra Leone, for example, resource extraction by foreign companies drastically ramped up immediately after the Lome Peace Agreement eventually ended that nation’s civil war in 2002. Companies exploited a lack of governance and support in the rural areas and often mined metals illegally or hazardously without any regulatory oversight. Today these areas still struggle with mining impacts, including contaminated drinking water and fish, the primary protein source in the area.

European Commission: “Ukraine green recovery Conference”

What is the environmental toll of war in Ukraine?

The damage is vast: There’s air, water and soil contamination, deforestation and enormous quantities of waste, including ruined buildings, burned-out cars and thousands of tons of destroyed military equipment. Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded villages, destroyed crops and wrecked irrigation systems.

The cost estimates are staggering. A joint commission of the World Bank, the government of Ukraine and other institutions currently estimate direct damages at roughly US$152 billion.

In addition, cleaning up sites, rebuilding infrastructure and other repairs could cost more than $486 billion over the next decade, as of late 2023. That figure rises every day that the war continues.

There’s broad interest in a green and sustainable reconstruction that would include steps like using sustainable building materials and powering the electricity grid with renewable energy. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been adamant that Russia must pay for the damage it has caused. It’s still unclear how this would work, although some U.S. and European lawmakers support seizing frozen Russian assets held in Western banks to help cover the cost.

There is a legal basis for holding Russia accountable. In 2022, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a set of principles for protecting the environment during armed conflicts. Among other existing statutes, they draw on a protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that prohibits using “methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.”

There has been only modest discussion so far of how to integrate these principles into a formal peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. But a working group that included Ukrainian and European Union officials and former leaders from Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Brazil has recommended a framework for addressing environmental damage and holding perpetrators accountable.

What environmental impacts are known or asserted in Gaza?

Environmental damage in Gaza also is devastating. The U.N. estimated in early 2024 that over 100,000 cubic meters (26 million gallons) of untreated sewage and wastewater were flowing daily onto land or into the Mediterranean Sea.

Gaza’s drinking water system was insufficient before the war and has been further weakened by military strikes. On average, Gazans now have access to about 3 liters of water per person per day – less than 1 gallon.

Thousands of buildings have been destroyed, spreading hazardous materials such as asbestos. Every bomb that’s dropped disperses toxic materials that will persist in the soil unless it’s remediated. Simultaneous environmental and infrastructure impacts, such as water and power shortages, are contributing to larger crises, such as the collapse of Gaza’s health care system, that will have long-lasting human costs.

How can future peace accords address these impacts?

Integrating the environment into peace accords isn’t easy. Resources such as energy, clean soil and water are vital for life, which is precisely why military forces may seek to control or destroy them. This is happening in both Ukraine and Gaza.

Peace negotiators tend to focus on social, political and economic issues, rather than environmental reparations. But leaving environmental damage unresolved until after a peace accord is signed keeps people who have been displaced and marginalized by conflict in precarious positions.

It may even cause fighting to resume. According to the U.N. Environment Program, at least 40% of all wars within states in the past 60 years have had a link to natural resources. In those cases, fighting was twice as likely to resume within five years after conflict ended.

We see some lessons for future negotiations.

First, it’s important for accords to recognize environmental harm as one of war’s main consequences and to acknowledge that a healthy environment is essential for sustainable livelihoods and peace.

Second, connecting environmental provisions with other issues, such as rural reform and political participation, can create better, more sustainable and equal conditions for reestablishing democracy. The Colombia accords are an example.

Third, it is important to clearly define goals, such as what infrastructure and institutions need to be rebuilt, who is in charge of getting those tasks done, and the timetable for doing it. This can help ensure that environmental restoration doesn’t become a secondary goal.

Fourth, the international community has an important role to play in monitoring and verifying environmental restoration and providing financial and technical support. Foreign donors have already pledged $66 billion for rebuilding Ukraine and have said that they will require grantees to follow strict environmental standards in order to receive financing.

Reconstructing nations and simultaneously regenerating communities and ecosystems after wars is a daunting mission, but it’s also an opportunity to build something better. We see Ukraine and Gaza as potential test cases for addressing war’s toll on the environment and creating a more sustainable future.

Richard Marcantonio, Assistant Professor of Environment, Peace, and Global Affairs at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez, Professor of the Practice in International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

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

(The Conversation) – Plastic pollution and climate change have common culprits – and similar solutions.

The penultimate round of negotiations for a global pact on plastic ended yesterday in Ottawa. Nearly 200 countries have agreed that a treaty must tackle plastic pollution at every stage of its existence, from oil rigs and refineries to factories, shops and homes. But when Rwanda and Peru proposed cutting the amount of plastic produced worldwide by 40% over the next 15 years, the UN talks faltered.

This stalemate has been, at least partially, engineered by the same companies stalling climate action: fossil fuel firms and their petrochemical partners.

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

Most plastics are derived from fossil fuels. Oil and gas companies extract these fuels and petrochemical firms refine and synthesise plastic from them. Reports suggest that the number of lobbyists representing both industries at the negotiations is increasing.

Recycled lobbying tactics

Reducing plastic production is the most effective way to cut pollution according to a recent study. Since a proposal for phasing down production failed to gain enough support in Ottawa however, it’s unclear what the agreement – expected later this year – will eventually look like.

“Will it be ambitious, with strict binding measures focusing on all stages of the plastics life cycle (including the ‘upstream’ stages associated with resource extraction, manufacturing and processing)?” ask Antaya March, Cressida Bowyer and Steve Fletcher, researchers who study the plastic waste epidemic at the University of Portsmouth.

“Or will it be a weaker treaty, with voluntary and country-led measures that focus mainly on waste management and pollution prevention (the ‘downstream’ stages)?”

Profit-minded petrochemical companies have long insisted that downstream strategies, like ramping up recycling, are the best way to manage plastic waste. An investigation showed this was disingenuous: plastic producers knew more than three decades ago that recycling was complicated, expensive and ineffective – despite what their marketing departments said.

Today, the global recycling system is a mess, says Kutoma Wakunuma, an associate professor of information systems at De Montfort University:

CBC The National Video: “Why it’s so hard to end plastic pollution”

“Although plastic waste can be seen as a trade between developed and developing countries, which allows the latter to be paid in exchange for dealing with that waste, this trade isn’t an equal one.”

Wakunuma describes how waste pickers in several African countries sift the imported refuse of richer nations for plastic bottles and other recyclable items. These workers, predominantly women, may be paid four pence a kilogram for what they manage to salvage, she says.

“And that waste sometimes ends up burned, rather than being recycled. In 2020, 40% of the UK’s plastic waste was sent to Turkey, where instead of being recycled some of it was illegally dumped and burned.”

Two billion people worldwide lack dedicated rubbish collection services. Many of them breathe toxic fumes from the open burning of plastic according to waste management experts Costas Velis and Ed Cook at the University of Leeds. This is a serious and overlooked health crisis, they say.

The recycling facilities of developing countries are overwhelmed. Yet oil firms see these places – where environmental regulations are typically weaker – as promising markets for more single-use plastic that is cheap and difficult to recycle says Deirdre McKay, a reader in geography and environmental politics at Keele University.

Turn off the taps

Fossil fuels and petrochemicals have a long history: the first synthetic chemicals were derived from coal. In the future, global demand for oil and gas will fall as more buildings and vehicles run on renewable electricity – but emissions will remain high if fossil fuel firms are allowed to continuing ploughing money into making plastics instead say industry sustainability experts Fredric Bauer (Lund University) and Tobias Dan Nielsen (IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute).

Some of the solutions to plastic waste and climate change are the same. Like scrapping fossil fuel subsidies, which keep plastic production (and fossil fuel extraction) artificially cheap.

More generally, evidence supports the idea of phasing out plastic production to curb mounting pollution – and something similar is true for climate change.

“There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change,” says Steve Pye, an associate professor of energy systems at UCL.

“Since no new fields need to be brought into development, global production of oil and gas should be falling.”

A legally binding agreement that aims to curtail plastic production could be the best outcome from the final summit in Busan, South Korea in late November. But even this may not deter countries and companies that make a lot of money from plastic. With equivalent climate legislation, “legally binding” in practice has meant campaigners having to drag governments and corporations through the courts for years to make them keep their promises says Rebecca Willis, a governance expert at Lancaster University.

At the very least, campaigners on both plastic waste and climate change can benefit from combining their efforts.

“The environment appears to be drowning in plastic for the same reason that global temperatures continue to rise,” says McKay. “Fossil fuels have remained cheap and abundant.”

Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

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

The Nile is one of the world’s most famous rivers. It’s also Africa’s most important freshwater system. About 300 million people live in the 11 countries it flows through. Many rely on its waters for agriculture and fishing to make a living.

The Nile’s two main tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, come together in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. This industrial hub has grown rapidly over the past few decades.

The Nile is not immune to the same pollutants that affect rivers all over the world. Plastic debris is of particular concern. Over time plastics break down into smaller pieces known as microplastics. These are tiny plastic particles with a maximum size of five millimetres, all the way down to the nanoscale. Recent research found that

rivers are modelled to export up to 25,000 tons of plastics from their sub-basins to seas annually. Over 80% of this amount is microplastic.

This has huge negative consequences for biodiversity and the climate. As microplastics degrade, scientists have found, they produce greenhouse gases. Airborne microplastics may influence the climate by scattering and absorbing solar and terrestrial radiation, leading to atmospheric warming or cooling depending on particle size, shape and composition. It also negatively affects animal and human health. Microplastics have been shown in laboratory studies to be toxic to animals and cells.

Much of the research about microplastics in African waters has focused on marine and coastal areas. To address this gap, I conducted a study to assess the presence of microplastics in the River Nile in Khartoum. My students and I tested for the presence of microplastics in Nile tilapia. This popular African freshwater fish species forms the basis of commercial fisheries in many African countries, including Sudan.

Photo by Islam Hassan on Unsplash

The results do not make for happy reading. In the 30 freshly caught fish we surveyed, we found a total of 567 microplastic particles. This shows that the River Nile is contaminated with microplastics that can be consumed or absorbed in various ways by the tilapia and other aquatic organisms.

Our sample

The fish used in our study were caught just after the meeting point of the two Niles, known in Arabic as Al-Mogran.

We visited the Al-Mawrada fish market in the Omdurman area, which is also alongside the Nile. All 30 specimens we bought were freshly caught.

We dissected the fish to remove their digestive tracts. The individual tracts were treated so they would digest any organic matter they contained without interfering with the analysis of microplastics. The resulting solution was subject to another extraction procedure and we then conducted physical and chemical analyses.

Every specimen had microplastics in its digestive tract.

The number ranged from as few as five to as many as 47 particles per single fish. In total we identified 567 particles. This is high compared to studies that have reported microplastics in tilapia species in other rivers and lakes. There is, as yet, no global guideline or standard for what might be an “acceptable” number.

Shape, size and colour

We detected different sizes of microplastics (0.04mm to 4.94mm), shapes (fibres, fragments, films, foams and pellets) and colours. The most common were very small (less than 1mm), fibrous – they appear slender and elongated – and coloured (dyed).

These characteristics make sense because of how fish and other aquatic organisms feed. Nile tilapia are versatile feeders: they consume a variety of organisms including phytoplankton, aquatic plants, invertebrates, detritus, bacterial films, as well as other fish and fish eggs. That puts them at a high risk of ingesting microplastics.

Nile tilapia are also more likely to consume particles that are within a similar size range as their natural prey, as well as the same shape and colour.

Smaller microplastics are especially good carriers for other pollutants such as heavy metals, resulting in additional health risks. Their small size also makes it easier for them to move into organs like the liver. Studies have found microplastics in the tissues, muscles, livers, blubber and lungs of other aquatic as well as marine mammal species.

Fibres, the most dominant shape found in our specimens, stay in the intestine for longer than other microplastic shapes. This, too, can lead to health problems for the fish. Coloured microplastics contain dyes, many of which contain toxic chemicals.

This all has serious implications for human health, as people catch and eat the fish, which introduces those microplastics and associated chemicals into their bloodstreams.

Pollution sources

Where does all this plastic originate? For starters, 65% of plastic waste in Khartoum is disposed of in open dumps. From there, it contaminates water bodies and other parts of the environment.

Image by Refaat Naiem from Pixabay

The city’s wastewater treatment system is ineffective. The three wastewater treatment plants in Khartoum state, Karary, Wd-Daffiaa and Soba, are outdated and do not meet local and international standards. That means untreated effluent from domestic, industrial and agricultural activities is another probable source of microplastic pollution.

There are also countless recreational sites along the River Nile in Khartoum. The Nile Street is the most popular in the capital city, hosting water sports, restaurants, cafes, clubs, event venues and hotels, as well as the tea ladies (women who serve hot beverages from makeshift mobile cafes along the banks of the river). However, waste disposal and collection practices are sorely lacking, so plastic litter from these leisure activities leaks into the river.

No easy fix

Tackling microplastic pollution is not easy. It will require technological advances, as well as the collective efforts of consumers, producers, governments and the scientific community.

As consumers, we need to change our behaviour around plastic products, especially single-use plastics. For example, opt for fabric shopping bags instead of plastic bags; use glass and metal containers. Recycling is also important.

Governments must enforce waste management regulations and improve waste management practices, as well as helping to improve public awareness. Strategies and policies must explicitly feature microplastics.

Scientists can not only fill the knowledge gaps around microplastics. Communicating scientific findings is crucial; so too is developing innovations to protect against microplastics and their harmful effects.

I would like to thank and acknowledge my student Hadeel Alamin, who conducted this study with me.

Dalia Saad, Researcher, School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand

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

(The Conversation) – On the morning of December 6 1917, a French cargo ship called SS Mont-Blanc collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The SS Mont-Blanc, which was laden with 3,000 tons of high explosives destined for the battlefields of the first world war, caught fire and exploded.

The resulting blast released an amount of energy equivalent to roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT, destroying a large part of the city. Although it was far from the front lines, this explosion left a lasting imprint on Halifax in a way that many regions experience environmental change as a result of war.

The attention of the media is often drawn to the destructive explosions caused by bombs, drones or missiles. And the devastation we have witnessed in cities like Aleppo, Mosul, Mariupol and now Gaza certainly serve as stark reminders of the horrific impacts of military action.

However, research is increasingly uncovering broader and longer-term consequences of war that extend well beyond the battlefield. Armed conflicts leave a lasting trail of environmental damage, posing challenges for restoration after the hostilities have eased.

Research interest in the environmental impacts of war

Toxic legacies

Battles and even wars are over relatively quickly, at least compared to the timescales over which environments change. But soils and sediments record their effects over decades and centuries.

In 2022, a study of soil chemistry in northern France showed elevated levels of copper and lead (both toxic at concentrations above trace levels), and other changes in soil structure and composition, more than 100 years after the site was part of the Battle of the Somme.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash

Research on more recent conflicts has recorded the toxic legacy of intense fighting too. A study that was carried out in 2016, three decades after the Iran-Iraq war, found concentrations of toxic elements like chromium, lead and the semi-metal antimony in soils from the battlefields. These concentrations were more than ten times those found in soils behind the front lines.

The deliberate destruction of infrastructure during war can also have enduring consequences. One notable example is the first Gulf War in 1991 when Iraqi forces blew up more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. Crude oil spewed into the surrounding environment, while fallout from dispersing smoke plumes created a thick deposit known as “tarcrete” over 1,000 sq km of Kuwait’s deserts.

The impact of the oil fires on the air, soil, water and habitats captured global attention. Now, in the 21st century, wars are closely scrutinised in near real-time for environmental harm, as well as the harm inflicted on humans.

Embed from Getty Images
American Red Adair fire fighting worker sets up a permanent hose 30 May 1991 in Al-Ahmadi oil field in southern Kuwait in order to keep the fire of the damaged oil wells in the direction of the wind whilst protecting the employees who attempt to extinguish it. In 1991, Iraqi troops retreating after a seven-month occupation, smashed and torched 727 wells, badly polluting the atmosphere and creating crude oil lakes. In addition, up to eight billion barrels of oil were split into the sea by Iraqi forces damaging marine life and coastal areas up to 400 kilometres (250 miles) away. Kuwait will seek more than 16 billion dollars compensation for environment destruction wrought by Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anba said 07 December 1998. (Photo credit should read MICHEL GANGNE/AFP via Getty Images).

Conflict is a systemic catastrophe

One outcome of this scrutiny is the realisation that conflict is a catastrophe that affects entire human and ecological systems. Destruction of social and economic infrastructure like water and sanitation, industrial systems, agricultural supply chains and data networks can lead to subtle but devastating indirect environmental impacts.

Since 2011, conflict has marred the north-western regions of Syria. As part of a research project that was led by my Syrian colleagues at Sham University, we conducted soil surveys in the affected areas.

Our findings revealed widespread diffuse soil pollution in agricultural land. This land feeds a population of around 3 million people already experiencing severe food insecurity.

The pollution probably stems from a combination of factors, all arising as a consequence of the regional economic collapse that was caused by the conflict. A lack of fuel to pump wells, combined with destruction of wastewater treatment infrastructure, has led to an increased reliance on streams contaminated by untreated wastewater for irrigating croplands.

Contamination could also stem from the use of low-grade fertilisers, unregulated industrial emissions and the proliferation of makeshift oil refineries.

More recently, the current conflict in Ukraine, which prompted international sanctions on Russian grain and fertiliser exports, has disrupted agricultural economies worldwide. This has affected countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Nigeria and Iran particularly hard.

Many small farmers in these countries may have been forced into selling their livestock and abandoning their land as they struggle to buy the materials they need to feed their animals or grow crops. Land abandonment is an ecologically harmful practice as it can take decades for the vegetation densities and species richness typical of undisturbed ecosystems to recover.

Warfare can clearly become a complicated and entangled “nexus” problem, the impacts of which are felt far from the war-affected regions.

Conflict, cascades and climate

Recognising the complex, cascading environmental consequences of war is the first step towards addressing them. Following the first Gulf War, the UN set up a compensation commission and included the environment as one of six compensable harms inflicted on countries and their people.

Jordan was awarded more than US$160 million (£127 million) over a decade to restore the rangelands of its Badia desert. These rangelands had been ecologically ruined by a million refugees and their livestock from Kuwait and Iraq. The Badia is now a case study in sustainable watershed management in arid regions.

In the north-west region of Syria, work is underway to assess farmers’ understanding of soil contamination in areas that have been affected by conflict. This marks the first step in designing farming techniques aimed at minimising threats to human health and restoring the environment.

Armed conflict has also finally made it onto the climate agenda. The UN’s latest climate summit, COP28, includes the first themed day dedicated to “relief, recovery and peace”. The discussion will focus on countries and communities in which the ability to withstand climate change is being hindered by economic or political fragility and conflict.

And as COP28 got underway, the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK charity that monitors the environmental consequences of armed conflicts, called for research to account for carbon emissions in regions affected by conflict.

The carbon impact of war is still not counted in the global stocktake of carbon emissions – an essential reference for climate action. But far from the sound and fury of the explosions, warfare’s environmental impacts are persistent, pervasive and equally deadly.

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Jonathan Bridge, Reader / Associate Professor in Environmental Geoscience, Sheffield Hallam University

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