At a conference in Seattle this summer, Coca-Cola set up shop in an exhibition hall to show off one of its most recent sustainability initiatives. A six-foot-tall interactive jukebox invited passersby to listen to “recycled records” — seven audio tracks that, according to Coca-Cola, represent the world’s first album made with recordings of the plastic recycling process.

The project, produced for Coca-Cola by the DJs Mark Ronson and Madlib, was meant to celebrate Coke’s decision to move from green to clear plastic bottles for three of its brands: Sprite, Fresca, and Seagram’s. Because clear plastic bottles are easier to recycle than green ones, Coca-Cola said they would advance a “closed-loop bottle-to-bottle economy” that uses materials more efficiently and creates less waste.

“Green plastic gets stuck in single-use ruts,” the company proclaims. “Clear plastic unlocks loops as sweet as donuts.”

It was just one of many creative displays at Circularity 23, an annual conference whose objective is to accelerate the “circular economy,” a term that generally refers to market systems that minimize raw resource extraction and waste. For two and a half days, 1,400 attendees — mostly from the world of corporate sustainability — wandered the halls of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Seattle, where companies like Coca-Cola were promoting their own ostensibly circular business practices. Many of these involved plastic: “reclaiming” it from rivers to create disposable mailing envelopes, melting it into its chemical building blocks so it can (theoretically) be used again, advertising its recyclability with QR codes on labels. 

Circular messaging was everywhere — understandably, given the name of the conference. But what was harder to find was a succinct definition of the word: What exactly is circularity, and what makes a product or practice circular?

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“I came away from the conference feeling like circularity has become synonymous with recycling, like we’ve lost the true definition,” said Sarah King, the head of Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign and one of a few environmental advocates who attended the event. 

Her concerns reflect a broader uneasiness within the environmental community about the way corporations have rallied around circularity, aggressively embracing it in their communications but not necessarily living up to its standards in practice. Coca-Cola’s clear plastic bottles, for instance, are a form of disposable plastic — made out of oil and gas, designed for just a few minutes of use, unlikely to be recycled, and fundamentally toxic to people and the environment. It’s also worth noting that an environmental group’s audit has found Coca-Cola to be the world’s biggest contributor to plastic litter every year for the past five years. (Coca-Cola did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

Some groups like Just Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for waste reduction, have dropped the term “circular economy” altogether. “The phrase is now being used to serve the interests of the huge corporations that are damaging our climate and spewing toxics into our communities,” said Kevin Budris, Just Zero’s advocacy director. 

“At this point,” he added, “any time I hear the phrase ‘circular economy’ I assume that it’s greenwashing.”

The idea of a circular economy has its roots in the environmental scholarship of the 1960s and ’70s. Writings like “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” published in 1966 by the American economist Kenneth Boulding, warned that ever-growing demand for resources could not be sustained on a finite planet. They advocated for a closed-loop system in which all resources are conserved.

These concepts resonated in a nascent environmental movement that sought to restore humans’ relationship with nature. In addition to the general environmental calamities of the 1960s through ’80s — oil spills in California, a polluted river that repeatedly caught on fire in Cleveland — the 1973 oil embargo by Middle Eastern states highlighted Western countries’ crippling dependence on nonrenewable resources. Though it’s unclear who first used the term “circular economy” — some say it was the British economists David Pearce and R. Kerry Turner in the ’80s — environmentalists were thinking critically about resource conservation and the limits to growth. (Incidentally, that was the title of a popular book published in 1972 by MIT researchers, which discussed the need to live within planetary boundaries by reaching an “equilibrium society.”)

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Over the next several decades, however, the notion of a circular economy evolved into something more market-oriented. It came to prominence alongside increasingly popular ideas about “green growth” and “sustainable development,” which accepted the premise that resources must be used efficiently, but stopped short of renouncing growth. The circular economy was seen as a kind of compromise: Conserve resources, but don’t sacrifice profit. 

This has made the concept extremely popular, both in the corporate world and on the international stage. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, or EMF — a nonprofit formed in 2010 to promote the circular economy — published a report in 2015 saying that a circular economy could “decouple global economic development from finite resource consumption.” That same year, the European Commission launched its first-ever “circular economy action plan,” which laid out dozens of actions that the European Union could take to promote “sustainable consumption and production patterns.” More recently, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the United Nations, the Biden administration, the Chinese government, and dozens — if not hundreds — of smaller state, regional, and city-level governments have also claimed to back some version of a circular economy.

However, precise definitions of the circular economy have been hard to nail down. EMF’s 2015 report said it could be “characterized, more than defined,” while broadly advocating for resource efficiency — whether by extending products’ lifetimes through maintenance and repair or by reusing materials through refurbishment. It described a hierarchy of ways to keep materials in circulation “at their highest utility and value,” with recycling as a last resort when other options had been exhausted.

“The circular economy is a new paradigm for our whole economic system, which makes it really hard to define in one sentence or paragraph,” said Sander Defruyt, who leads an EMF initiative on plastics.

Other explanations of circularity are similarly imprecise, with a tendency to say what a circular economy does or involves rather than what it is. At Circularity 23, for example, instead of defining the circular economy, most speakers gave examples that seemed to vaguely embody its ideals, like buying secondhand clothes or growing new green onions from the roots of those you buy at the store. In a keynote address, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell used it to talk about his parents’ frugal shopping habits. (“We wasted nothing in the Harrell house,” he told the crowd, because his father was always “tight with the money.”) In another speech, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee broadened things even further by insisting that the circular economy should apply not only to physical materials, but also to the “joules and ergs of energy” captured by renewables.

“Everyone is talking about the circular economy, but nobody seems to know what it means,” said Vito Bounsante, technical and policy adviser for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network. In Europe, where the EU has made billions of euros available for governments, businesses, organizations, and academics to advance its circular economy action plan, he described a cynical, opportunistic scramble to use the term for attention and cash. “Just put the words ‘circular economy’ in your funding proposal, and you’ll get the money,” he said.

In theory, the circular economy captures all three R’s of the simple waste-management hierarchy: reduce, reuse, recycle. But corporate visions of the concept tend to focus on the third R, and mostly for plastics. Indeed, there’s a feeling among environmental groups that the very term “circular economy” has become a kind of code for “more plastics recycling.” 

This was apparent at Circularity 23, where speakers spent panel after panel wringing their hands over “hard-to-recycle” plastics: things like bags, wrappers, and films, which are typically not accepted by the facilities that sort and process materials for recycling. Environmental groups argue there’s a simple solution to this glut of stuff: “Stop using it,” according to Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. Advocates say manufacturers should rethink product delivery systems so they don’t rely on packaging at all, or can work with an alternative that isn’t made from plastic. But those solutions were far from many conference-goers’ minds. Instead, they justified plastic packaging on social justice grounds (“It helps make products more accessible to developing economies,” as one chemical company executive put it) and heralded the promise of chemical recycling, a controversial technology that melts plastic into polymers that can theoretically be turned into new products.

“We are pushing chemical recycling because we see that there are materials that can’t be recycled without it,” one panelist said, citing her company’s “salty snacks” packaging as an example.

Defenders argue that chemical recycling could make plastics as circular as glass and aluminum, which are considered to be “infinitely recyclable.” (Unlike plastic, they can be recycled again and again into the same products without degrading.) Even the United Nations Environment Programme has endorsed chemical recycling, describing it in a report published this May as a key solution on the path toward “circularity in plastics.”

However, experts from outside the petrochemical industry say it doesn’t work. Independent investigations have repeatedly found that most chemical recycling projects over the past several decades have failed or never got off the ground due to technical and economic hurdles. Those in operation today mostly turn plastics into fuel to be burned for energy or industrial uses, a process that is not circular under any traditional definition of the word. 

Not even mechanical recycling — the more conventional alternative to chemical recycling — seems capable of creating the “plastic circular economy” that many companies advertise. In the U.S., the plastics recycling rate is just 5 percent, and experts say it’s unlikely to improve: There’s simply too much plastic, in too many different varieties — most of which are too expensive or technologically difficult to turn back into new products. Meanwhile, plastics that do get recycled usually can’t be turned back into the same items more than a couple of times; soon, they have to be “downcycled” into something like a carpet or decking. Eventually, the plastic life cycle ends at a landfill or an incinerator, meaning more virgin plastic — made from fossil fuels — is required to make new products.

What’s more, recycled plastics may be contaminated with any number of 13,000 chemical additives, more than 70 percent of which are either known to have hazardous properties or have never been tested for toxicity. Plastics manufacturing, use, and disposal already exposes people to these chemicals — especially poor people and people of color — but mechanical recycling can keep them circulating through the economy for even longer. It can also shed thousands of tons of microplastics, tiny shards of plastic that poison the food chain and release greenhouse gases.
“There’s just no way to do plastics in a truly circular way,” said Budris, with Just Zero. Others have called the plastics circular economy “an oxymoron at its core.”

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Instead of trying to “wedge” plastics into the circular economy, Budris said there’s an urgent need to reverse the plastic and petrochemical industries’ expansion. These industries are planning to triple plastic production by 2060 — in part to offset declining demand for fossil fuels used for electricity, heat, and transportation. According to the International Energy Agency, plastics are expected to drive almost half of oil demand by the middle of the century. 

This issue has played prominently at negotiations for a global plastics treaty, where environmental groups have urged U.N. member states to “turn off the tap” and dramatically scale down plastic production. At the country level, they tend to support bills like the U.S.’s Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2021, which never advanced out of committee but would have put a pause on new or expanded petrochemical facilities and banned several types of disposable plastic. Other countries’ efforts, like the groundbreaking anti-waste and circular economy law that France passed in 2020, limit single-use plastic alongside complementary initiatives to reduce food waste and increase the repairability of phones, computers, and other electronics.

The need to reduce plastics wasn’t completely lost at Circularity 23, either. At one panel, small business owners talked about their efforts to set up plastic-free reuse programs — one Vancouver, Canada-based company, for example, allows restaurants to serve takeout meals in stainless steel containers, which can later be returned at drop-off locations around the city. At another, Washington state representative Liz Berry spoke about her efforts to advance the WRAP Act, a far-reaching bill that would create a bottle deposit program, set mandatory quotas for reusable packaging, and hold companies financially responsible for dealing with the plastic they produce, among other things.

The most powerful rebuke of the plastics circular economy, however, came during a keynote Q&A on the second day of the conference, when Joy and Jo Banner — sisters who lead The Descendants Project, a nonprofit based in a swath of Louisiana studded with so many petrochemical facilities that it’s been dubbed “Cancer Alley” — were asked how the world should address the plastic pollution crisis. Jo responded directly to the audience by describing how her community evacuates during a hurricane: People abruptly stop what they’re doing, pile into their cars, and all drive in the same direction — away from the danger.

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“That’s exactly what we need for plastics,” she said: “contraflow. We all need to move away from it, we need to stop making excuses for it, we need to stop trying to make the economy off of it. Stop giving fossil fuels a lifeline.”

The audience applauded and whooped at her remarks — in fact, the Banner sisters got a standing ovation. Then, Circularity 23 attendees went to the next event, a collection of roundtable lunch discussions hosted by Dow, Eastman, Arkema, and other chemical companies and organizations that claim to be “enabling a circular economy” throughplasticsrecycling.

Jon Smieja, the vice president of circularity for GreenBiz, the media and events organization that hosted Circularity 23, is not unaware of the controversy surrounding the circular economy. While he believes there is no one correct way to define circularity, he said he sees plenty of selectivity among corporations when it comes to describing their circular business practices.

Many companies choose the part of circularity that “aligns most with what they feel like they can do,” he said. Some promote a circular economy even as they participate in lobbying groups that advocate against circular policies like those contained in the WRAP Act.

Defruyt, with EMF, agreed. EMF maintains there can be a place for plastics in a circular economy — the organization even has a “new plastics economy” initiative for corporations and governments to sign onto, pledging to decrease virgin plastic use, incorporate more recycled content into their plastic packaging, and make all of their plastic recyclable, compostable, or reusable. But Defruyt said companies tend to ignore important principles like eliminating unnecessary materials use and allowing nature to regenerate.

Companies ask, “I want to put something plastic on the market, how do I make it circular?” Defruyt said, instead of choosing materials and business models that are best suited to the circular economy.

In some cases, businesses adopt one or more principles of circularity without actually being circular. One company promoting itself at the conference, for example, said it takes “ocean-bound plastics” out of rivers in Southeast Asia and turns them into new mailing sleeves — a business model that might eke one more use out of discarded waste, but is predicated on, and potentially contributes to, a continuous supply of plastic litter. (A spokesperson from the company told Grist the mailers are “by no means a perfectly circular product,” but noted that they would remove waste from the environment in places where there is insufficient waste-management infrastructure.) 

Another company at the conference, r.Cup, provides transparent reusable cups for concerts, football games, and other large events. Though they’re a clear improvement over disposable cups, r.Cup’s reusable alternatives are made of polypropylene, a kind of rigid plastic that can only be used so many times before it reaches the end of its life. In general, polypropylene products are only turned into new items through downcycling, though they’re more likely to be sent to landfills or incinerated. R.Cup’s founder told Grist his company’s cups are never sent to landfills and are only “upcycled” into opaque plastic cups, guitar picks, Frisbees, or other items.

Smieja called these “stop-the-bleeding stopgap” solutions that can at least reduce plastics’ impacts while, in the case of the plastic cups, proving the viability of reuse. 

More broadly, a spokesperson for GreenBiz defended plastics and plastics companies’ role — both in the circular economy and at Circularity 23. “For better or for worse, plastics have a role in our current society,” the company said. “Some companies are, paradoxically, both part of the problem and key to implementing solutions at scale.”

Still, Smieja and others agreed that they might call for more specific language than just “circular.”

“Maybe we don’t have to use the word ‘circular’ with the consumer,” Suzanne Shelton, CEO of a marketing communications agency called the Shelton Group and a speaker at Circularity 23, told Grist. Rather than claiming to be circular, she said, it’s more helpful when brands describe how their products support a circular economy. If they’re compostable, brands can just say that, she said. If their products are recyclable, then advertise that — but clarify how many times they can be recycled.

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That’s similar to the approach of organizations like Just Zero and Beyond Plastics, which have abandoned circular terminology despite its deep entrenchment in business and policy spheres. Erica Cirino, communications manager for the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition, said there’s a risk of any term being co-opted “in the blink of an eye,” but she and others prefer to use words like “reusable,” “refillable,” and “zero-waste,” which more precisely convey the concepts of material conservation and resource efficiency. King, with Greenpeace Canada, said she also tries to emphasize slowness, with reduced production and consumption throughout the economy.

Not all corporations, governments, and intergovernmental organizations, however, are likely to make those distinctions voluntarily. If the circular economy is going to remain in the corporate and policymaking vernacular — as it likely will — then environmental groups say it should be qualified with terms like “toxics-free” or “reuse-based.” Ideally, they’d like regulators to step in with clearer guardrails against greenwashing.

“I think the Federal Trade Commission should take it on,” said Enck, from Beyond Plastics. The FTC, which protects U.S. consumers from deceptive or unfair business practices, is already working on revisions to its Green Guides, a set of guidelines around companies’ sustainability advertising. The most anticipated revision is expected to offer a firmer definition of the term “recyclable,” but Enck said there’s no reason it couldn’t also define circularity, potentially with different criteria for different industries. (The Green Guides updates were expected by the end of last year but have been delayed. It’s unclear when they will be released.)

“The first pillar needs to be conservation of resources and efficient use of resources,” Enck said, calling for guidelines that prioritize the three R’s of the zero-waste movement: “reduce, reuse, refill.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the ‘circular economy’ went from environmentalist dream to marketing buzzword on Aug 9, 2023.

Cruising by on a boat, it’s easy to miss Jake Patryn’s farm, which looks like nothing more than an unassuming row of red and white buoys floating just off the coast of Machias, Maine. The crop he and co-founder Morgan-Lea Fogg gather each spring lies just below the surface: long lines of slick brown sugar kelp. After growing nearly 10 feet during the winter — amassing vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids along the way — the kelp is primed for its moment in the sun. A quick taste test proves it true: Their crop is ready to harvest.

This marks Patryn’s sixth year as a seaweed farmer, but he’s been working on the water for much longer. Hailing from a commercial lobstering family in Maine, Patryn sees cultivating this marine crop as a lifeline for a community threatened by fishing’s uncertain future. While he still casts his traps on occasion, farming kelp by hand and selling it as snacks and seasonings has become his main focus.

It may seem quaint compared to the industrial operations that grow most of the world’s food, but outfits like Patryn’s Nautical Farms are poised to skyrocket in number over the next few years. Now seen as a “future-proof” material, seaweed is a hardy, fast-growing protein source useful for everything from biofuel to petroleum-free plastic to consumer goods like utensils, soap, clothing, and of course, food. The World Bank said raising this versatile crop in just 5 percent of U.S. territorial waters would produce as much protein as 2.3 trillion hamburgers and sequester the carbon emissions of 20 million cars. 

Given all that, the market, which stood at $15 billion two years ago, is projected to hit $24.92 billion in 2028. There were 30 venture investments in seaweed startups throughout North America last year, with some $130 million raised. The Department of Energy is throwing $22 million toward exploring how growing 500 million tons of macroalgae per year could meet 10 percent of the nation’s demand for transportation fuel.

Although China, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines still account for more than 95 percent of global production, farms in North America – particularly British Columbia, Alaska, and Maine – are cropping up to meet demand. But just like industrial agriculture on land, such operations can harm the environment – and given the role kelp forests play in sequestering carbon, the climate. Monocropping, the introduction of non-native species, and poor management have led the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to declare “commercial kelp harvesting is potentially the greatest threat to long-term kelp stability nationwide.” 

In response, cultivators are calling for more policies to govern their business and protect waterways and marine ecosystems. This climate work is no less critical than reducing the world’s demand for beef or easing its dependence on fossil fuels because this ubiquitous plant provides essential habitat for hundreds of marine species, offers protection from storms and coastal erosion, and draws millions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year. Marine algae also provide around 50 percent of the planet’s oxygen. Seaweed is, in many ways, already saving the world. People like Patryn want to make sure their growing industry doesn’t do anything to mess that up. 

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to have thousands of kelp farms all up and down the coast of Maine, peppered in every single bay,” he said. “Growing this industry overnight would be a good way to to tarnish it before it even gets off the ground.”

Thousands of species of seaweed fill the world’s oceans, but only a handful are cultivated for human consumption. In North America, kelps, which thrive in cold, shallow, nutrient-rich waters, are the most commonly farmed varieties.

In the wild, thick ribbons of the stuff stretch up to 200 feet long, sheltering a wide variety of sea life. Rumor has it that the sheer size of South American kelp forests led Charles Darwin to remark, “I can only compare these great aquatic forests with the terrestrial ones in the inter-tropical region. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of the kelp.” 

Growing the stuff is remarkably straightforward: Farmers cast seedlings out on ropes and submerge them until they’re ready to harvest a few months later. It’s also relatively cheap. Seaweed is a “zero-input crop,” meaning it doesn’t need any additional food, fertilizer, or freshwater to grow. Bren Smith, who started the regenerative ocean farming company GreenWave, writes in his book Eat Like a Fish that anyone with $20,000 and a boat has enough to start harvesting 10 tons of kelp per acre — and net as much as $120,000 per year doing it, given they find the right buyer. 

When Patryn and Fogg started Nautical Farms back in 2017, they were lucky to grow a few hundred pounds in a season. Now, they’re managing a 5-acre sea farm in Englishman Bay and cultivating thousands of pounds of kelp in the process. They used to sell their harvest to a few buyers, but these days they have as many as half a dozen part-time employees helping them dry sugar kelp, skinny kelp, and alaria themselves to make nearly a dozen different snacks and other goods. 

Most of the nation’s seaweed farming occurs in their home state of Maine, with its abundance of cold, clean water and working waterfronts, and in Alaska, which has those things and the nation’s longest coastline. The two states account for more than 85 percent of the U.S. supply of edible seaweed. The 27 operations within Atlantic Sea Farms in Maine, for example, harvested nearly 1 million pounds last year. A 100-acre Alaskan operation owned by Premium Aquatics, which sells its bounty under the brand Seagrove Kelp Co, has become the largest kelp farm in the U.S in the four years since its founding.

The nutrient-rich and biodiverse waters around Vancouver provide another thriving location for kelp cultivation. Cascadia Seaweed, also founded in 2019, operates eight farms covering 62 acres. It plans to have 1,235 acres under cultivation by 2025 (and that many more pending development) as it looks to expand more than tenfold in the next decade. Government funding has given the company a good head start: It has provided two grants worth $5.8 million to help build a new farm and processing facility.

Since most U.S. seaweed farms sit within a few miles of shore, they are governed by state laws, which can vary widely. Maine limits farm size from 400 square feet to 100 acres depending on the lease, for example, while Alaska strictly regulates where species may be grown. Still, there are no national regulations monitoring seaweed farming. Canada doesn’t have much in the way of rules, either. There are currently no policies around farm size or native seed collection in British Columbia. 

While this piecemeal approach has worked out so far, industry insiders wonder how it will hold up as farms become larger and drift further from shore. Growing enough seaweed for the biofuel needed to meet the nation’s energy needs, for example, will require more than a few buoys in a bay.

Amanda Swinimer of Dakini Tidal Wilds, who has been wild-harvesting seaweed off the west coast of Vancouver Island since 2003, believes the seaweed industry has already started sneaking up on policy — with potentially costly results. “There was no need to have regulations around seaweed farming before because nobody was doing it before,” she said. “But now, if both the feds and the provincial government are throwing the kind of money at it that they are, policymakers should be doing primary research and putting some basic regulations in place.” 

One question looming over the North American seaweed market is how big is too big. Large-scale monoculture outposts covering 100 acres or more could starve the surrounding ecosystem of nutrients, obstruct wildlife migration patterns, or prevent sunlight from reaching other flora and fauna. Massive seaweed operations in Asia offer a cautionary tale. In China, where farms can cover 15,000 acres, pests and bactia infections present a growing concern. Some diseases are triggered by abiotic factors: Unfavorable conditions like too much or too little light have provided the conditions they need to spread rapidly, ruining an estimated 25 to 30 percent of annual seaweed harvests and changing the microbial structure of nearby ecosystems.

“There’s always going to be a point where you get too much of a good thing,” Scott Lindell, a marine farming researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said. “And we don’t know where that breaking point is.”

The introduction of non-native species also could pose a risk. Seaweed farmers choose strains that are resilient, fast-growing, and tolerant to many conditions — precisely the traits, scientists warn, that could allow them to overwhelm their habitat and crowd out other species. Varieties that are new to an area also can carry dangerous “hitchhikers.” 

“You can’t guarantee that you’re just importing the seaweed,” said marine biosecurity researcher Elizabeth Cottier-Cook. “There will be other things like microorganisms attached to that seaweed that could then cause disease and spread to wild native strains as well.” 

Seaweed farms can also be vehicles for food-borne diseases when improperly managed, as seen with a Salmonella outbreak traced to a Hawaiian seaweed farm in 2016.

Rapid growth of an industry that gets ahead of market demand could lead to significant waste issues, too, said Anoushka Concepcion, who works in marine aquaculture for NOAA’s Sea Grant program in Connecticut. She points out that the reason government-funded farms in China or Korea can stay afloat is because they feed populations accustomed to eating seaweed many times a day. The average American palate doesn’t have the same taste for the sea veggie, so barring quick innovation on the biofuel and bioplastic fronts (still very much in their infancy), huge seaweed farms in the West could leave whole lot of product left to rot. 

Finally, Swinimer, who makes her living harvesting wild seaweed, worries about the risk of farmed seaweed mixing with wild strains. Seaweed hybridization has already happened off Oslofjord, an inlet of Southeast Norway, to unknown consequence.

“There are fewer boundaries in the ocean than there are on land,” Swinimer said, introducing the threat of genetic intermingling. Given the essential role seaweed, particularly kelp forests (often called the sequoias of the sea), plays in sequestering carbon and providing oxygen, Swinimer is worried about the risks industrial-scale cultivation has on this invaluable organism.

“Seaweed is already saving the world from climate change,” she said. “If we mess with that, we are going to be in big, big trouble.”

When considering how to regulate the seaweed industry to mitigate potential climate pitfalls, Cottier-Cook points to a “restorative aquaculture” model that would incentivize ecologically beneficial farming. Governments could, for example, pay farmers for the carbon their crops capture; a new type of blue subsidy. Smith’s company GreenWave is testing this idea with its Kelp Climate Fund, which awards farmers up to $25,000 per season for the carbon and nitrogen capture and reef restoration they provide. 

Encouraging the growth of hyper-native seaweeds will also make sense in some places. Alaska leads the way here, with state laws that require farmers to collect their kelp seeds from within 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) of their grow site each year to ensure their crops share their genetic makeup with local wild stocks. Laws that prohibit altering the marine ecosystem in any way, like Maine’s strict regulations that fine farmers for abandoned gear, could also help keep quell aquaculture’s environmental impact.

While the process to secure an seaweed farming lease is closely regulated by a state’s department of marine resources or environmental conservation, government involvement fades once the first lines are dropped in the water. While Concepcion notes that some states are talking about enforcing more rigorous inspections and penalties, it’s a slow process in a new industry that still has so many question marks. “Agencies are hesitant to establish a policy because they don’t know what to expect,” Concepcion said. “They don’t want to add additional requirements to farmers that make it harder to get involved. But at the same time, they want to be cautious because they don’t want an accident to happen. So right now it’s still a lot of vetting of information, and a lot of discussion.”  

The most important decisions have not yet been made. The regulations policymakers pass in the next few years ultimately will determine not only how and where seaweed is grown, but whose hands (or if the techies get their way, robotic appendages) grow it. Will the farms of the future be owned by massive corporations, or by local cooperatives? Those in coastal communities whose livelihoods hinge on ocean health would argue for the latter. 

“The people who I think should be in kelp farming are fishermen who already know how to work on the water, already have a boat, and already have another generation coming up underneath them to raise on the water,” said Patryn. 

Dune Lankard, an Eyak Athabaskan Native of the Eagle Clan from Cordova, Alaska, also transitioned from fishing to kelp farming after watching local fisheries collapse. He started the non-profit Native Conservancy to help other Native peoples start kelp farms in order to maintain food sovereignty and cultivate a resource that has long been a part of their ways of life.

If passed, the federal Coastal Seaweed Farm Act of 2023 would help further this mission by establishing an Indigenous seaweed farming fund and publishing a report outlining how to responsibly scale seaweed in the U.S. with the help of Indigenous knowledge.

A spokesperson for U.S. Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska, who introduced the bill with Representative Jared Huffman of California in March, said it has received positive feedback and the lawmakers hope it will be included in this year’s farm bill. 

As seaweed inhabits the liminal space between land and sea, it holds the opportunity to build a new food sector that is more equitable, efficient, and environmentally informed than those that came before it. By incentivizing restoration, prioritizing native planting, taking a precautionary approach to expansion, and centering coastal community knowledge, the industry can grow in a fast yet controlled and methodical way. In short, it can grow like seaweed itself.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The kelp business is booming. Can regulators keep up? on Aug 9, 2023.

H

ey there, welcome to another issue of Record High. My name is Zoya Teirstein, and this week I’m taking you inside emergency rooms in Phoenix — a place that just endured 31 consecutive days at 110 degrees Fahrenheit or above. It was the hottest month, on average, in any U.S. city on record.

To understand how those temperatures are affecting residents in real time, I spoke to two physicians in Phoenix about what this summer of extremes looks like in their domain, the emergency room. As I reported this week, Kara Geren and Frank Lovecchio, two emergency medicine physicians in the metro of 1.6 million people, have been seeing patients show up with the same exact symptom: dehydration. No matter what the patient comes in for — whether it’s chest pain or a chronic health condition such as diabetes — they also likely need fluids. “What surprised us is even people that came in for completely unrelated things are dehydrated,” Geren said. “It’s just so hard to stay hydrated.” 

The patients presenting with surprise dehydration add to the considerable number of people coming to the ER with symptoms consistent with heat-associated illness: heat rashes, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea — and the most severe form of heat sickness, heat stroke. But Geren and Lovecchio have also seen a number of patients with severe burns from hot pavement and scorching surfaces. On a 100-degree Fahrenheit day, asphalt in direct sunlight will heat up to 160 degrees — more than hot enough to give someone a third-degree burn. “Our burn unit is very, very busy,” Lovecchio said. 

The Maricopa County Department of Public Health, covering metro-area Phoenix, has reported 39 deaths connected to heat since April; the medical examiner’s office suspects there have been 312 more deaths associated with heat in the county, which are currently under investigation. The elderly, the unhoused, and people who use opioids are especially at risk of developing severe heat sickness and dying. 

Geren and Lovecchio have been cooling people down however they can — they immerse patients in large tubs of cold water or zip them into body bags filled with ice. They chill intravenous fluids and oxygen before administering them, and cool patients with industrial-strength fans. But both doctors worry about the future.

There are efforts underway at the federal level to fund solutions. Last week, Democratic lawmakers, including Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, reintroduced the Preventing HEAT Illness and Deaths Act, legislation aimed at mitigating deaths by reducing people’s exposure to extreme heat. That’s in addition to Gallego’s efforts to get FEMA to add extreme heat to its qualifying list of major disasters, as my colleague Jake Bittle reported in this newsletter last week. 

But it’s unclear how far those bills will get. Many Republican lawmakers, improbable as it sounds, are moving in the opposite direction. In mid-July, House Republicans proposed deep cuts to the budgets of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior. The effort is unlikely to be successful, with Senate Democrats sure to block it. But the GOP’s spending bill, which proposes slashing EPA funding by nearly 40 percent, shows how the right is thinking about this summer of extremes. 

Policy experts at the Environmental Defense Fund told Grist that one of the programs that could face the chopping block if Republicans get their way is the EPA’s Heat Island Reduction Program. The initiative seeks to decrease exposure to extreme heat in urban areas with little tree cover, particularly in low-income and minority communities that are disproportionately burdened by extreme heat.

Meanwhile, Geren is thinking ahead to next summer and even hotter summers to come. “If we’re keeping the way we are, I just don’t know how people can live here,” she said.

By the numbers

In Arizona, one of the states where heat-related deaths are most common, the number of fatalities in metro-area Phoenix have been rising in recent years. This year, officials have reported 39 deaths connected to heat so far, but that number will likely change as the summer continues and hundreds of other deaths are investigated.

Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern / Grist

What we’re reading

The wacky world of heat insurance: You’ve heard of flood insurance and wildfire insurance, but what about heat insurance? A new suite of unconventional heat insurance products has emerged in a range of countries around the world. Can they help protect us? My colleague Jake Bittle reports. 

Read more

How heat isolates: Americans are becoming increasingly isolated. Believe it or not, that can make extreme heat more fatal. My colleague Akielly Hu explains how isolation compounds the risks of heat exposure and how cities can reduce those risks.

Read more

Children threatened by extreme heat: A United Nations report shows 460 million children under the age of 18 in South Asia are already exposed to 83 or more days a year in which temperatures exceed 95 degrees. Three-quarters of children in the region are exposed, compared to one in three children globally.

Read more

South America is rewriting the climatic books: It’s supposed to be the middle of winter in Chile and Argentina, but temperatures in the region are abnormally high — upward of 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. “Some places have even reached all-time maximums — surpassing summer temperatures, even though it is winter,” Ian Livingston wrote for the Washington Post.

Read more

Extreme heat is ‘boring’: Scoff at the headline, but give this essay on cabin fever, or “climate ennui,” in Arizona a chance. Caroline Tracey writes a blazingly good first-person account of being trapped indoors during the summer in Tucson for Zocalo Public Square.

Read more

Heat comes with a steep price tag: New research shows extreme heat is costing the U.S. economy big time — $100 billion in 2020 and a projected $500 billion annually by mid-century. “From meatpackers to home health aides, workers are struggling in sweltering temperatures and productivity is taking a hit,” Coral Davenport reports for the New York Times.

Read more

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How doctors treat extreme heat on Aug 8, 2023.

Jera Slaughter looks at her backyard with pride, pointing out every feature and explaining how it came to be. The landscaping committee in her apartment building takes such things seriously. But unlike homeowners who might discuss their prized plants or custom decking, Slaughter is describing a beach, one covered in large concrete blocks, gravel, and a small sliver of sandy shoreline that overlooks Lake Michigan. It’s a view worthy of a grand apartment building built on Chicago’s South Side in the 1920s and deemed a national historic landmark.

But repeated flooding has over the years radically remade the private beach. Slaughter has lived in the Windy City long enough to remember when it extended 300 feet. Now it barely reaches 50. Her neighborhood might not be the first place anyone would think of when it comes to climate-related flooding, but Slaughter and her neighbors have been witnesses to a rapid erosion of their beloved shoreline. 

“Out there where that pillar is,” she said, pointing to a post about 500 feet away, “that was our sandy beach. The erosion has eaten it away and left us with this. We tried one year to re-sand it. We bought sand and flew it in. But by the end of the season, there was no sand left.” 

Recent years have seen high lake levels flood parking garages and apartments, wash out beaches, and even cause massive sinkholes. It’s a growing hazard, one that Slaughter has been desperately fighting for years. 

“All things considered, this is our home,” she said. 

Lake Michigan has long tried to take back the land on its shores. But climate change has increased the amount of ground lost to increasingly variable lake levels and ever more intense storms. What was once a tedious but manageable issue is now a crisis. The problem became particularly acute in early 2020 when a storm wreaked havoc on the neighborhood, severely damaging homes, flooding streets, and spurring neighbors to demand that City Hall support a $5 million plan to hold back the water. 

“We need to be prepared for higher lake levels,” said Charles Shabica, a geologist and professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University. 

Though Shabica says the erosion in the Great Lakes region won’t be on par with what rising seas will bring to coastal regions, he still notes it’s an issue that Chicago must prepare for.

“We’ll see climate impacts, but I think we can accommodate them,” said Shabica.

Beyond flooding homes, that epic storm opened sinkholes and washed out certain beaches, leaving them eroded and largely unusable. But the people of South Shore refused to give in easily. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching water, residents have organized their neighbors and prompted solutions by creating a voice so loud that politicians, engineers, and bureaucrats took heed. In 2022, state Representative Curtis Tarver II helped secure $5 million from the state of Illinois to help solve the issue. 

“For some odd reason, and I tend to believe it is the demographics of the individuals who live in that area, it has not been a priority, for the city, the state, or the [federal government],” Tarver said.

After years of tireless work, folks in this community have convinced the city to study the problem of lakeside erosion to see how bad this damage from climate change will be — and how fast they can fix it.

Slaughter founded the South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force alongside Juliet Dervin and Sharon Louis in 2019 after a few particularly harsh fall storms caused heavy flooding in the area.

Chicagoans in the predominantly Black and middle-class South Shore had noticed the inequitable treatment of city shoreline restoration projects. Beaches in the overwhelmingly white and affluent North Side neighborhoods received more media coverage of the problem, faster fixes, and better upkeep, according to the group. This disparity occurred despite the fact that South Side beaches have no natural barriers to the lake’s waves and tides, placing them at greater risk of erosion.

“We were watching the news coverage [of] what was happening up north as if we weren’t getting hit with water on the south end of the city,” said Louis. 

The threat is undeniable to Leroy Newsom, who has lived in his South Side apartment for 12 years. Despite the fact that another building stands between his home and the lake, he and his neighbors often experience flooding. The white paint in the lobby is mottled with spackle from earlier repairs. During particularly intense deluges, the entryway can become unnavigable. A large storm hit the city on the first weekend in July, inundating several parts of the city and suburbs. 

“When we get a rainstorm like we did before, it floods,” he said.

Newsom lives on an upper floor and has not had to deal with the particulars of cleaning up after flooding, but he has noticed it is a persistent issue in the neighborhood. 

Louis, Dervin, and Slaughter have spent countless hours tirelessly knocking on doors and even setting up shop near the local grocery store to teach their neighbors about lake-related flooding. They wanted to mobilize people so they could direct attention and money toward solving the issue. They also researched the slew of solutions available to stem the tide of the lake.

“People were making disaster plans, like, ‘What if something happens, this is what we’re gonna do’. And we were looking for mitigation plans, you know. Let’s get out in front of this,” said Louis.

Solutions can look different depending upon the area, but most on the South Side mirror the tools engineers have used for years to keep the lake at bay elsewhere. What makes these approaches a challenge is how exposed the community is to Lake Michigan in contrast to other neighborhoods. 

“South Shore is uniquely vulnerable,” said Malcolm Mossman of the Delta Institute, a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues in the Midwest. “It’s had a lot of impacts over the last century, plus, certain sections of it have even been washed out.” 

The shoreline throughout the city is dotted with concrete steps, or revetements, and piers that extend into the lake to prevent waves from slamming into beaches. It also has breakwaters, which run parallel to the shoreline and are considered one of the best defenses against an increasingly active Lake Michigan.

“The best solution that we’ve learned are the shore parallel breakwaters,” said Shabica. “And we make them out of rocks large enough that the waves can’t throw them around. And the really cool part is it makes wonderful fish habitat and wildlife habitat. So we’re really improving the ecosystem, as well as making the shoreline inland a lot less vulnerable.”

Shabica also mentions that this isn’t a new solution. The Museum Campus portion of the city, which extends into the lake and includes the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, used to be an island before engineers decided to connect it to the shoreline in 1938.

The main component of the plan to help reduce repeated flooding in the neighborhood is to install a breakwater around 73rd Street using the funding Tarver helped earmark for the issue, according to Task Force co-founder Juliet Dervin. This solution would help prevent the types of waves and flooding that damage streets, most notably South Shore Drive, which is the extension of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Past damage to the streets has rerouted city buses that run along South Shore Drive and interrupted the flow of traffic. 

One local resident installed a private breakwater at her own expense following the 2020 storm, just a few blocks from Slaughter’s house, and it has tempered some effects of intense storms and flooding. But since this breakwater is smaller, surrounding areas are still vulnerable. Breakwaters can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on size and other factors. 

Despite funding now being allocated to fix the issue and government attention squarely focused on lakefront-related flooding there are still hurdles to overcome. 

Both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Chicago Park District are in the middle of a three-year assessment of the shoreline to determine appropriate fixes for each area. The study will finish in 2025, decades after the last study of this kind was conducted in the early 1990s. This gives Slaughter pause. 

“If I tell you this continuous erosion has been going on for such a long time, then you would have to know, they have looked into it and studied it from A to Z,” she said. “What do you mean, you don’t have enough statistics? We’ve done flyovers and all kinds of things. People who’ve been here filming it, when the water jumps up to the top of the building, they’ve seen it slam into things.”

For her, the damage has been clear but the prolonged period of inaction and lack of attention from outside groups means a shorter window to implement fixes. Slaughter sees this as a fundamental flaw in how we approach issues stemming from the climate crisis. 

“The philosophy,” she said, “is repair, not prevent.”

This story was updated to give the correct year in which $5 million was secured from the state of Illinois to address the erosion.

This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal, and Wisconsin Watch, as well as the Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On Chicago’s South Side, neighbors fight to keep Lake Michigan at bay on Aug 8, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

When Donna Crawford didn’t hear back from her brother Lyle, she began to fear the worst. It was Monday, June 28, 2021, at the tail end of a blistering heat dome that had settled over the Pacific Northwest. Two days prior, daytime temperatures had soared to 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Gresham, Oregon, where Lyle lived alone in the small yellow house the siblings had grown up in. “I hope you’re doing OK in the heat,” she had said into his answering machine that day.

By the time Donna contacted the police, Lyle had already died alone in his house; a box fan was found swirling oven-hot air nearby. He was 62 years old. 

Lyle lived for most of his life in Gresham, a suburb outside Portland, spending his time hiking through the mountains and rivers of Oregon and caring for his mother before her death. Although he was friendly and enjoyed chatting with his barber and other acquaintances, he had few friends later in life and grew even more isolated during the pandemic. Donna, his only remaining family, lived 3,000 miles away in Richmond, Virginia. 

“He would have answered the door if someone knocked, and that might have done it. An actual human being,” Donna told county health officials. “But how can there be enough human beings to go to the door of every older person?” Lyle was one of at least 48 people living alone who died in Multnomah County, which includes Gresham and Portland, during the heat wave.

In May, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning that Americans are experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” The report lays out a worrying array of statistics showing that people are less socially connected than ever before. In 2021, almost half of Americans reported having fewer than four close friends, while only a quarter said the same in 1990. U.S. residents spent 24 more hours per month alone in 2020 than they did in 2003. Only 3 in 10 Americans know most of their neighbors. And people living alone now make up 29 percent of U.S. households, compared to 13 percent in 1960. 

The isolation crisis is compounding the dangers of deadly heat waves fueled by climate change. In the U.S. and many other countries, social isolation is a major risk factor for dying during a heat wave. Experts say that isolation is made worse by a shortage of social infrastructure like libraries, local businesses, green spaces, and public transit, leaving people who are older and live in disinvested neighborhoods most at risk from extreme heat. As heat waves become more frequent, cities are exploring strategies to build social connections and reach isolated individuals before it’s too late.

“We talk a lot about the emerging climate crisis, but far less about the social infrastructure crisis,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, told Grist.

In the U.S., up to 20,000 people died of heat-related causes between 2008 and 2017. At scorching temperatures, people can experience heat exhaustion, a condition that causes heavy sweating, nausea, and fainting. If left untreated, it can lead to heat stroke, a potentially fatal illness that causes delirium, a rapid heart rate, and eventually organ damage and shutdown. Many heat deaths are also caused by heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues made far more likely by exposure to extreme heat. 

Klinenberg and other experts stress that all heat-related deaths are preventable, including those that happen when a person is alone. During a heatwave, it’s possible to check in on neighbors and bring people air conditioning units or help move them to cooling centers. Analogous life-saving measures aren’t always possible during other extreme weather events, like hurricanes or floods.

“There’s been a long understanding of how heat affects your body and a long understanding of a range of interventions to get your core body temperature back down,” Kristie Ebi, a global health professor studying the impacts of climate change at the University of Washington, told Grist. “People don’t have to die.”

But without adequate outreach, it can be easy for isolated individuals “to get into trouble with the heat,” Ebi said. That’s because heat accumulates in the body gradually, so even a healthy person may not realize that their core temperature is reaching dangerous levels until it’s too late. 

For older adults, the risks of heat and isolation are especially acute. Older people are more likely to experience risk factors that can cause or exacerbate isolation, including living alone, chronic illness, and loss of family and friends. At least a quarter of Americans age 65 and older are considered socially isolated. At the same time, older adults are also more at risk during heat waves because they do not adjust as well as younger people to sudden changes in temperature. They are also more likely to have a chronic illness or take medication that affects their body’s ability to regulate temperature. 

Ebi notes that not only does isolation increase the risk of heat — heat can, in turn, increase isolation. Heat exhausts the body’s energy supply and can impact cognitive function, causing symptoms like confusion. Many people already not feeling up for socializing on a typical day due to chronic medical conditions may feel even less able to reach out during a heat wave.

Research has shown that due to sheer proximity, neighbors are among the most effective first responders during a natural disaster. In a well connected neighborhood, where residents trust their neighbors and participate in local activities and groups, people are more likely to share resources and help one another prepare for and recover from disaster events. As a result, communities with robust social networks tend to fare much better during extreme weather like heat waves. 

Klinenberg first observed this pattern while studying the social and economic disparities that shaped a devastating 1995 heat wave in Chicago. Over the course of five days, more than 700 people died as temperatures climbed up to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Residents who were poor, Black, and older died at disproportionately high rates. When comparing neighborhoods with similar levels of income and people living alone, he found that far fewer deaths happened in communities that were better connected than in more isolated areas. 

One aspect those neighborhoods had in common was an abundance of social infrastructure, or the physical places that enable interaction, Klinenberg found. It can be something as simple as a stoop or a park bench to pause on. At a larger scale, social infrastructure can look like a bustling sidewalk, a community garden, the subway, or a local library — anything that “gives people a place to gather and draws people out of their homes into contact with neighbors,” Klinenberg said. 

“The people who lived in depleted neighborhoods, places that had lost their social infrastructure, were far more likely to die alone than people who lived in neighborhoods with a rich social infrastructure,” he said — “for the simple reason that you’re more likely to wind up home alone.”

In Chicago and elsewhere in the U.S., access to those public spaces is highly unequal, owing to decades of disinvestment in historically redlined neighborhoods and other low-income communities. As a result of racist housing, lending, and transportation policies, predominantly Black communities and communities of color disproportionately live in neighborhoods that lack adequate housing, schools, transportation, parks, and other essential infrastructure. Previously redlined neighborhoods also tend to experience hotter temperatures due to the urban heat island effect, where a lack of green spaces and more paved roads and buildings lock in heat and raise temperatures up to 12.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than non-redlined areas.

These inequalities have fatal consequences. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indigenous people and Black people had the highest rates of heat-related deaths in the U.S. between 2004 and 2018. In New York City, local officials reported that the heat-related death rate among Black people from 2011 to 2020 was more than twice as high as that of their white counterparts.

Bharat Venkat, a professor of society and genetics at UCLA and director of the UCLA Heat Lab, said the issue of infrastructure is just one way in which extreme heat lays bare the dangers of existing inequities.

“Those vulnerabilities are ones that are produced socially and politically,” he said. “And that’s what makes the heatwave so deadly and dangerous.” 

Recognizing the risks of isolation, many cities have ramped up community outreach during heat waves. As part of early warning systems, cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia send out text alerts, connect with community and faith-based organizations, and conduct on-the-ground outreach to at-risk populations. Phoenix, Miami, and Los Angeles have gone a step further by appointing chief heat officers to coordinate citywide responses to heat emergencies. Those plans include measures like distributing maps to cooling centers and water bottles, calling residents directly, and raising awareness of heat risks through broadcasting on television, radio, social media, and billboard ads. 

In Philadelphia, 6,000 volunteer “block captains” serve as neighborhood leaders for residential blocks ranging from as few as four households to as many as 99 households. The initiative, which was created primarily to lead street clean-up efforts, has also proven an effective way of reaching residents during heat emergencies, according to Dawn Woods, administrator of the program. Block captains receive information on city services and resources from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and help share knowledge by hosting block meetings and connecting with folks one-on-one.

“For neighbors who are sick or can’t leave their home, we ask block captains to just constantly check in on them and make sure that they have phone numbers on hand, so that they can reach out to somebody in the event of an emergency,” Woods told Grist.

Klinenberg and Venkat said that although community outreach is important, cities should also work to address the broader issues that deepen isolation and heat risk. That includes addressing a national shortage of affordable housing that leaves more people unsheltered, less able to access cooling and community resources, and at greater risk of dying during a heat wave. It also means investing in neighborhoods to build and maintain the local businesses and public facilities that give people the chance to connect with their neighbors.

Venkat pointed to other pressing needs, such as making energy costs more affordable so that people don’t have to choose between putting food on the table and running air conditioning. Another is ensuring rights to cooling for renters and people living in public housing. In Phoenix, for example, a city ordinance requires landlords to provide air conditioning or other cooling systems for rental units. Venkat said cities should also step up efforts to plant trees in neighborhoods that lack green spaces, which provide vital shade and cooling in places where asphalt and concrete trap heat.

“It’s not that people die from heat waves,” Venkat said. “What they die from are social and political decisions about how we govern and take care of people.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A crisis of isolation is making heat waves more deadly  on Aug 8, 2023.