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Last month, the American Chemistry Council, a petrochemical industry trade group, sent out a newsletter highlighting a major new report on what it presented as a promising solution to the plastic pollution crisis: using “recycled” plastic in construction materials. At first blush, it might seem like a pretty good idea — shred discarded plastic into tiny pieces and you can reprocess it into everything from roads and bridges to railroad ties. Many test projects have been completed in recent years, with proponents touting them as a convenient way to divert plastic waste from landfills while also making infrastructure lighter, more rot-resistant, or, ostensibly, more durable.
“As our nation sets about rebuilding our infrastructure and restoring our resilience, plastic will play an outsized role,” the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a petrochemical industry trade group, says on one of its websites.
But independent experts tell a much more complicated story, suggesting that most applications involving plastic waste in infrastructure are not ready for prime time. In recent years, several reports and literature reviews have highlighted the unknown health and environmental impacts of repurposing plastic into construction materials. They’ve also warned that post-consumer plastic isn’t desirable for use in many types of infrastructure — and that diverting plastic into construction is unlikely to make much of a dent in the massive tide of plastic waste that the developed world produces. To the contrary, adding used plastic to construction materials could even incentivize more plastic production.
Take a closer look at the 407-page National Academies of Sciences report the ACC highlighted in its newsletter, for example, and you’ll find that it said there has been virtually “no significant research” in the United States to back claims about the benefits of using plastic in roads. Other construction applications face “high material and installation costs,” as well as “uncertainties about long-term performance and environmental impact.”
“There is opportunity to expand reuse of plastics in infrastructure applications,” the report concludes, “but it is not clear that this reuse pathway offers the greatest benefit to society.”
Several recent studies have raised environmental concerns about microplastics, tiny fragments of plastics that could potentially slough off of plastic-infused infrastructure. Others say plastic chemicals could leach from plastic-infused construction materials into nearby waterways. (This already happens with materials that don’t have plastics in them.)
In general, experts say there’s been a near-total lack of research on the human health and environmental impacts of incorporating waste plastic into construction materials. A literature review published last month in the journal Frontiers in Built Environment, for example, looked at 100 recent studies on the topic and found that not one of them evaluated potential health costs of putting used plastic into roads, buildings, and other construction applications. Several studies addressed environmental implications, but mostly to highlight the potential to divert plastic waste from landfills.
According to Erica Cirino, lead author of the review and the communications manager for the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition, it was these omissions that allowed the majority of the studies to portray putting discarded plastics into infrastructure as a “net positive.”
“There were a lot of aspects being overlooked,” Cirino told Grist, including the fact that several plastic-waste-in-infrastructure applications require the addition of new chemicals that could be harmful to human health. That’s on top of the 13,000 chemicals already found in plastics, one-fourth of which are known to have hazardous properties.
Cirino also noted that a greater number of studies she reviewed were funded by chemical and plastic makers than by independent researchers, although this finding was not included in her final paper.
The other major research gap, identified by Cirino’s team as well as other groups, is on the structural integrity of infrastructure incorporating plastic waste. Of the many uses for plastic waste that the National Academies looked at, including in asphalt, bike paths, lumber, marine pilings, railroad ties, utility poles, highway sound barriers, and bricks, only one — stormwater drainage pipes — has attracted significant demand from infrastructure owners. Other applications have deterred contractors because of the plastic-infused materials’ lower strength and stiffness, greater vulnerability to UV degradation, and propensity to crack.
Most applications, though, have a very limited track record, having only been deployed in small-scale pilot projects or tested in the lab. “There’s just not a lot of information available and data that have been collected,” said David Dzombak, a professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and chair of the committee that wrote the National Academies report. “The studies have been short-term and have limited scope in the questions they’re trying to answer.”
Even in a scenario where it was proven viable to put plastic waste in infrastructure, Dzombak said it isn’t clear this would be a significant sink for the more than 30 million metric tons of plastic waste that the U.S. generates each year. First, project developers tend to be fussy with the plastic they use: If they’re going to incorporate it into infrastructure, it usually has to be clean and high-quality polyethylene, not just whatever scraps of mixed plastic waste can be scraped from the bottom of consumers’ recycling bins.
Infrastructure “is not just a dumping ground for plastic waste,” Dzombak said. In fact, he said demand is greater for post-industrial plastic scraps than for post-consumer plastic waste, contrary to the notion promoted by industry groups that roads and other infrastructure are commonly being made from discarded diapers, plastic bags, and other low-quality plastic trash. Such projects exist but are considered anomalous, and their performance and environmental impacts are poorly understood.
Second, the limited research that’s out there suggests that plastic waste can only make up a small fraction of most infrastructure materials. Asphalt pavement, for example — perhaps the most hyped-up kind of plastic infrastructure — can only accommodate a maximum of 0.5 percent waste plastic by dry weight, according to the National Academies’ literature review. The group’s “best-case scenario,” in which discarded plastic completely replaces virgin plastic in all of the United States’ sales of plastics-modified asphalt binder, would consume only 2.4 percent of the country’s trashed polyethylene every year, and an even smaller percentage of its total plastic waste generation.
“That’s not negligible, but it’s not going to be a game-changer,” Dzombak said. Besides, he added, there’s actually considerable demand for the kind of high-quality waste plastics that can be used in infrastructure. Rather than diverting this plastic from landfills, putting it in construction materials might divert it from other second-use applications like carpeting and clothing.
The ACC did not respond to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.
Looking at the bigger picture, many environmental advocates are concerned about the way proponents talk about waste plastics in infrastructure as a “recycling” solution that contributes to a “circular economy.” Even if infrastructure applications do divert plastic from landfills, Cirino said, they’re just a stopping-over point. Because most plastics are nonrecyclable by nature — especially those that are mixed with other materials, since it’s so difficult to separate and process them back into the same products — plastics in infrastructure are likely to end up in a landfill at the end of their life, necessitating a continued supply of waste plastic. Paradoxically, for some construction materials that are normally recyclable, such as asphalt, putting discarded plastic into them may make it so they can no longer be recycled.
Putting discarded plastic into infrastructure “can create new markets for more plastic waste, which in turn means more plastic production,” Cirino said. The system “is not circular and cannot be circular.” Her review paper said upstream strategies for addressing plastic pollution — like limiting plastic production — are “clearly favorable” to approaches that merely manage waste.
To be sure, many experts agree there are legitimate uses for plastics in infrastructure — compared to other materials, plastics may be lighter, more resistant to corrosion, and more malleable. The nonprofit Alliance for Sustainable Building Products, based in the U.K., says that as long as construction involves plastic, it might as well be “recycled” plastic, although it notes that plastics are generally overused in the construction industry.
Dzombak, with the National Academies, said there is still potential for “circularity” in some cases, like with stormwater drainage pipes made from discarded plastic that could be recycled into new pipes. He said the question of whether to reduce plastic production was beyond the scope of the National Academies’ recent report and instead urged federal agencies to work together on an improved recycling strategy, including better collection and processing of discarded plastic.
Overall, however, Dzombak, Cirino, and others say more research is needed to substantiate the plastic industry’s enthusiastic claims about the supposed promise of putting waste plastic in infrastructure — especially research on the idea’s environmental and health implications. Such research should examine the full life-cycle impacts of plastic production and disposal, Cirino said, and draw from what we already know about plastics’ risks.
“There is already a huge existing amount of information about the ecological, health, and social costs of plastic,” she said. “To really consider the full impacts, we need to dive even deeper.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Using ‘recycled plastic’ in construction materials may not be a great idea after all on Aug 10, 2023.
This post has been updated.
Nelly Niumatalolo couldn’t believe it when she heard it. A wildfire in Lahaina? The Oahu-born grandmother was just there in April, visiting her 39-year-old son, his fiancé, and her granddaughter. Surely it wasn’t like the fires she’d seen in her home state of California, where she’s lived for the past three decades, watching fire after fire sweep through towns with increasing ferocity.
But as Niumatalolo clicked through Facebook on Wednesday, the images and footage streaming out of the disaster unfolding in west Maui looked apocalyptic. There was Front Street, an ash-gray shell of itself, just blocks away from where her son had lived until Tuesday. There was the huge banyan tree near the shoreline, 150 years old, blackened, surrounded by empty plots of decimated buildings. There were the fishing boats where her son had worked for the past four years, burnt and floating or conspicuously gone.
Also missing was her son, Jake Atafua, who stopped responding to texts Tuesday afternoon after heading back to the fire when a friend called for help. Niumatalolo joined a chorus of people online posting photos, begging for any proof that he had survived what’s being called the worst natural disaster in Hawaii in 30 years.
“As a mother, it’s been heartbreaking, because you never expect anything like this to happen to you or to one of your children. I’m just, I’m not together, I’m just a little broken,” she said. “Somewhere deep in my heart I have faith, I know whatever happens, I know the Lord will give me that peace to know that he will be OK. But I’m very broken. Because that’s my son. He’s my only boy.”
The raging fires killed at least 36 people on Maui, destroying the historic town of Lahaina and causing what is expected to be billions of dollars in damages. More than 2,000 people filled emergency shelters, with thousands more stranded at the airport trying to leave. Twenty people suffered serious burns as of Wednesday, with some airlifted to the state’s only burn unit on Oahu, and many more were missing.
Dozens of people jumped off of Lahaina Harbor to escape the smoke and flames, prompting a Coast Guard rescue and local effort to pull people into boats and later, collect the bodies floating by the seawall. The governor called in the National Guard, and opened the Hawaii Convention Center on Oahu to help house 4,000 tourists whom state officials asked to leave Maui. President Biden directed “all available federal assets” to help with the disaster response, including Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.
Hawaii state leaders were caught off guard by the fact that winds from Hurricane Dora passing south of the archipelago this week fueled the conflagration, for hours preventing helicopters from getting airborne to pour water on the flames.
Clay Trauernicht, a wildfire scientist at the University of Hawaii, said unmanaged non-native grasslands that proliferated with the shuttering of the state’s plantation economy over the past several decades created lots of fuel ready to spark.
“There’s all these huge, huge quantities of vegetation and it’s all papery thin and ready to go,” he said. “The landscape is primed to burn and so it makes us incredibly vulnerable when these weather conditions line up.”
And line up they did. Abby Frazier, a climatologist at Clark University, said it’s dry season and more than a third of Maui County is in drought. West Maui is the drier side of the island — added to that, it’s an El Niño year. The weather phenomenon is marked by unusually warm surface waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean that disrupt atmospheric circulation, leading to extreme weather conditions.
“You have a hurricane moving to the south of us and you have this high pressure system to the north and that’s creating really, really strong winds and low humidity, which is the prime thing you need for fire,” Frazier said, calling from a busy Honolulu airport. “You need dry fuels and you need these atmospheric conditions, and that’s exactly what we have right now.”
The fires raged not only on Maui but also on Hawaii Island, where highways similarly closed and many were evacuated and lost power. But the brunt of the damage was on Maui, where firefighters still battled the flames Wednesday evening.
Trauernicht and Frazier said while many people don’t associate wildfires with Hawaii, they’re actually pretty common and becoming increasingly so. Three years ago, Hurricane Lane set aflame 3,000 acres both on Maui and Oahu. Climate change is expected to bring more drought and stronger, more frequent storms.
In some years, as much as 1.5 percent of the state’s land will burn, a proportion comparable to some states in the American West, but firefighters usually prevent the flames from reaching homes. This time, they couldn’t. Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network, was brimming with grief as he watched the images of destruction on his home island and texted with friends rendered suddenly homeless.
The former state legislator says he wants people to know that Lahaina is not just a tourist town, a place where people go to tiki bars and shop. Its historic importance to Indigenous people like himself goes beyond its plantation houses — it was for a time the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, once the site of the palace of King Kamehameha III.
“If you walk end to end on Front Street, you’ll actually see it’s like a Disneyland ride of the timeline of commerce in Hawaii from royalty to whaling, sandalwood, sugar and pineapple, tourism and luxury,” he said. He sees the fire as a tragic symbol of the terminal point of that progression of colonization and capitalism: “where it all ends up if you continue down this trajectory.” He wants President Biden to take far more aggressive action to confront the climate crisis.
But this is not the end. Next year could be just as bad, or worse.
“One thing that makes me nervous is we tend to get more rainfall in the summer with El Niño and then we get drought in the winter, which builds up all these fire fuels and then dries them out,” said Frazier. “And so we can also expect a pretty bad wildfire season next year.”
Trauernicht hopes this prompts the state to take fire prevention seriously by establishing networks of fire breaks, incentivizing grazing, and pursuing other ways to minimize risk.
“Because those fuels can be altered, we don’t have to be vulnerable. We can change them proactively,” he said.
But he added that one element of this week’s tragedy is new, and still needs to be grappled with: the emotional trauma of the sudden disaster.
It remains unclear how many people lost their homes, how many have died. Maui was already facing a major affordable housing crisis and it’s not clear where people will live, who will leave, whether they’ll have a choice. Many in West Maui still lacked cell service Wednesday, and others who were able to tell their stories said they felt shell-shocked.
“It was like a war zone,” Alan Barrios told Honolulu Civil Beat, explaining he had to leave one of his four cats behind while escaping Lahaina after the feline bolted. “There was explosions left and right.”
As of Wednesday evening, Niumatalolo still hadn’t heard from her son, feeling anxious and weighed down by the heaviness of not knowing. But she added one thing was certain: “I don’t think Maui will be the same.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfires just destroyed a Maui town. Next year could be worse. on Aug 10, 2023.
Scientists have discovered a new ecosystem beneath hydrothermal vents inside cavities of a well-explored undersea volcano. The volcano is located on the East Pacific Rise off the coast of Central America.
An international team of scientists from Slovenia, Costa Rica, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, led by Dr. Monika Bright, an ecologist at the University of Vienna, took a month-long expedition on board Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI)’s Falkor (too) research vessel, a press release from SOI said.
The research team used the ocean institute’s underwater remotely operated vehicle SuBastian to turn over chunks of volcanic crust to find cave systems housing snails, worms and chemosynthetic bacteria thriving in water that was 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
For the past 46 years, scientists have studied microbial life living in the subsurface, but had never searched for marine animals underneath the warm volcanic vents.
“The deeper you go, the warmer it goes, the less oxygen there is, the more toxic chemicals are in it,” Bright said, as The New York Times reported. “It’s very shallow, but it’s still below the Earth’s crust.”
The team found evidence that tubeworms — a foundational animal of hydrothermal vents — and other vent animals travel through vent fluid beneath the seafloor to colonize new habitats, the press release said. Not many tubeworm offspring were found in water above the vents, which led the researchers to think they might travel under the surface to create new populations.
“Our understanding of animal life at deep-sea hydrothermal vents has greatly expanded with this discovery,” Bright said in the press release. “Two dynamic vent habitats exist. Vent animals above and below the surface thrive together in unison, depending on vent fluid from below and oxygen in the seawater from above.”
Hydrothermal vents flow like underwater hot springs through cracks made by tectonic activity. Ecosystems follow new hydrothermal vents, colonizing them within a few years. Scientists don’t yet know how the larvae discover new vent fields.
The team used the underwater robot to confirm that animals move through vent fluids. They did this by gluing mesh boxes on top of cracks in the crust. After several days, the boxes and crust were removed to reveal animals living underneath in hydrothermal cavities.
“On land we have long known of animals living in cavities underground, and in the ocean of animals living in sand and mud, but for the first time, scientists have looked for animals beneath hydrothermal vents,” said Dr. Jyotika Virmani, executive director of SOI, in the press release. “This truly remarkable discovery of a new ecosystem, hidden beneath another ecosystem, provides fresh evidence that life exists in incredible places. Schmidt Ocean Institute is proud to have provided a platform for Dr. Bright and her team to gather new insights into these systems that may be vulnerable to deep-sea mining.”
Los Angeles-based artist Max Hooper Schneider accompanied the research team on the expedition. Hooper Schneider made sculptures that were filmed on the vent systems, and will incorporate the artistic research into future exhibits.
“Lightless ecosystems of the deep ocean are imperative to understanding the extremophilic dawns of planet earth,” Hooper Schneider said in the press release.
Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of SOI, said the expedition’s discoveries show how important it is to explore the ocean’s depths to understand what life exists there.
“The discovery of new creatures, landscapes, and now, an entirely new ecosystem underscores just how much we have yet to discover about our Ocean — and how important it is to protect what we don’t yet know or understand,” Schmidt said in the press release.
The post ‘Remarkable Discovery’ of Life Beneath Hydrodermal Vents Is Another Argument for Protecting the Deep Ocean appeared first on EcoWatch.
Representatives from the eight countries that share the Amazon river basin have signed the Belém Declaration, an agreement to work together to conserve the planet’s largest rainforest that includes a list of shared environmental measures and policies. However, the accord fell short of a consensus on ending deforestation.
The countries — Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela — were not able to agree on how to manage industries that are destroying and sapping the resources of the vital rainforest, like oil, mining and beef, reported The Guardian.
“The Amazon is our passport to a new relationship with the world, a more symmetrical relationship in which our resources will not be exploited for the benefit of a few, but valued and placed at the service of all,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the meeting, as The New York Times reported.
The Amazon rainforest extracts and sequesters an enormous amount of the human-produced carbon dioxide that is driving the climate crisis. But this oasis of biodiversity has been disappearing at an alarming rate, with around 17 percent having been decimated in the past 50 years.
Lula has been attempting to get the other countries in the region to join Brazil in stopping deforestation by 2030, reported Reuters.
While the Belém Declaration did help to foster a united front in fighting the destruction of the rainforest, it was left to individual Amazon nations to put together their own deforestation objectives.
As heat waves, flooding and water shortages ravage the planet, and land and sea temperature records continue to be broken, many scientists are frustrated with the pace of policymakers in acting on climate change.
“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement — in large letters — that deforestation needs to be zero,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of Brazilian environmental lobby group Climate Observatory, as Reuters reported.
The final draft of the declaration maintained the protections and rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as stated that the Amazon countries would work together on sustainable development, water management, health and shared negotiating stances at climate summits.
The declaration recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledge in the preservation of biodiversity and called upon the participation of Indigenous Peoples in decision-making and the formulation of public policy, reported Down To Earth.
“Indigenous People are under constant threats and land rights will not only give them better protection, it will also prevent deforestation and protect the rich biodiversity within these territories,” said Anders Haug Larsen, director of international advocacy for the Rainforest Foundation Norway, as Down To Earth reported.
The only Amazon countries that failed to sign a 2021 agreement made between more than 100 nations to work to stop deforestation by 2030 are Venezuela and Bolivia, reported Reuters.
Brazil has been considering the development of offshore oil near the northern coast, an area dominated by rainforest.
“A jungle that extracts oil — is it possible to maintain a political line at that level? Bet on death and destroying life?” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the meeting, in reference to reforesting cleared plantations and pasture, as The Guardian reported.
The Belém Declaration succeeded in establishing a science body that will meet each year and give reports on Amazon rainforest-related science, similar to the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.
The post Amazon Nations Sign Rainforest Protection Agreement, but Don’t Agree on Deforestation Deadline appeared first on EcoWatch.
This week, South American leaders descended on Belém, Brazil, to try to save the Amazon rainforest. It was the first meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization in 14 years. The summit, however, has produced mixed results.
In a declaration released yesterday, the eight nations that are home to the rainforest agreed to take “urgent action to avoid the point of no return in the Amazon,” combat organized crime, and bolster regional cooperation. But the accord did not resolve tensions over some of the thorniest issues affecting the region, such as a unified approach to deforestation and whether to limit fossil fuel extraction in the delicate ecosystem.
“We would have been super happy to have specific goals and mechanisms,” Vanessa Pérez-Cirera, the director of the global economic center at the World Resources Institute, told Grist. “This is a good first step.”
The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covering some 2.5 million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for planet-warming emissions and home to a fifth of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and human-caused climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Experts have long called for immediate and drastic actions to protect the rainforest and the hundreds of Indigenous groups that inhabit and care for it.
“We’re going to be crossing tipping points for the global climate. They are points of no return, [and] the Amazon is absolutely central to that,” said Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia. But what was discussed at the conference, he added, were “the easy things.”
The nearly 10,000-word summit declaration recognized the scientific imperative to avoid tipping points in the Amazon and pledged to renew regional cooperation to avoid that end. It also acknowledged the central role that Indigenous communities play in conservation efforts and called on developed countries to fulfill their promises of financial support.
“The forest unites us. It is time to look at the heart of our continent and consolidate, once and for all, our Amazon identity,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “In an international system that was not built by us, we were historically relegated to a subordinate place as a supplier of raw materials. A just ecological transition will allow us to change this.”
The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, and Lula has made its protection a hallmark of his presidency. Deforestation has already dropped since he took office this year, which is a major shift from the environmental devastation that proliferated under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. This summit was another attempt to reverse that trend.
“It’s completely a break from the Bolsanaro era. It’s important that that happened,” said Fearnside. Still, he was disappointed that the group didn’t adopt a ban on oil development in the Amazon, a step that leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro championed but other countries were less reluctant to embrace.
“Brazil has a big plan for oil and gas in the western part of the state of Amazonas,” Fearnside said, which would be “disastrous.”
Leaders also failed to find common ground on deforestation, which has already claimed nearly a fifth of Amazon and is on track to degrade even more of the rainforest. “The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement — in large letters — that deforestation needs to be zero,” Marcio Astrini of environmental lobby group Climate Observatory told Reuters.
Answers to those difficult questions are being pushed to another time, perhaps even the next gathering of the treaty organization — which experts hope won’t take another 14 years. Pérez-Cirera is optimistic and sees this summit as a catalyst for future action.
“It is a historic moment for the Amazon,” she said. “And more needs to come.”
The conference concludes today, as leaders from the Amazon nations meet with representatives of other countries with large rainforests, such as Indonesia, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The aim is to plan for COP28, the global United Nations climate summit in November.
“We want to prepare for the first time a joint document of all forest countries to arrive united at COP28,” Lula said last week.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Summit to save the Amazon from ‘the point of no return’ yields mixed results on Aug 9, 2023.
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