This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

On a Saturday in February, high school senior Kaylee Lemmien sifted through racks of dresses at Tinker Tailor, a small shop in downtown Elk Rapids, a village of about 1,500 people in northern Michigan.

“I’d call this a mermaid, sequin, light blue gown with a tulle skirt. It’s got a lace-up back, kind of open,” Lemmien said. “Very pretty.”

Tinker Tailor usually alters clothes, but on this day it was selling them — prom dresses, to be exact. Gowns in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors — short and long, neons and pastels, satin and sequins — lined the racks. The garments were donated and consigned by people around the region, with the goal of giving them a new life at the Elk Rapids High School prom in May. Called Sustainable Style, the secondhand shopping initiative takes aim at fast fashion. 

Zoe Macaluso, the president of the Eco Club at Elk Rapids High School, said that when a local volunteer group approached her with the idea, she “immediately latched onto it.” The Eco Club wants to use the project to lead by example and hopefully inspire other schools in the area to pursue their own climate projects.

It’s one of many efforts by high school students around the country to address fast fashion — clothing produced cheaply and quickly enough to stay on top of swiftly moving trend cycles — in their own lives and through advocacy. Such efforts are small, but experts say they can help people — especially young people — think differently about their role as consumers. That’s especially relevant in the age of fast fashion, when an online retailer like Shein drops up to 10,000 new items a day.

“Fast fashion is a trend driven by newness,” said Shipra Gupta, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Springfield. “It tends to treat its products like food that spoils quickly.”

The increased focus on sustainability and thrifting might seem counter to the rise of fast fashion. It’s been described as a paradox, especially for Gen Z. A McKinsey newsletter last year laid out the relationship like this: “On one hand, Gen Zers express a desire for sustainably produced items and love thrifting. On the other hand, clothing ‘hauls’ … make up some of the most watched and most produced content on social media.”

One way high school students are counteracting that offline is by raising awareness in their communities about how fashion impacts the environment. Last year, for example, a high school in New York put on a carbon-neutral prom. A club in New Hampshire organized a clothing drive to divert used clothes to people experiencing homelessness. And a library in Athens, Georgia, regularly hosts a “Bling Your Prom” secondhand formal wear event with an eye toward sustainability.  

Fast fashion encourages people to cycle through clothing quickly, with serious consequences. But getting reliable information on just how much damage the fashion industry inflicts on the climate is difficult. Its lack of transparency is one reason for that; less than half of brands track all levels of their complex supply chains. Some have made climate pledges but have consistently fallen short of their goals. And while key legislation that would help tackle the problem is pending in places in the U.S. and Europe, policy progress has been slow.

Constantly being exposed to new items can trigger a desire to buy more, said Gupta. By bringing an event like Sustainable Style to the community, she said, the students in Michigan are harnessing that excitement and channeling it toward more environmentally conscious shopping.

“Community involvement is a way of doing that grassroots-level movement, where we can actually create an awareness among the community members,” she said, and that can make them consider what it means to be a responsible consumer.

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Events like Sustainable Style can cut back on consumption locally, providing a responsible place to donate and buy used evening wear. That’s important especially in small towns where options can be limited.

In the past, students in Elk Rapids usually ordered dresses online or traveled to hubs like Grand Rapids, a two-hour drive south.

“You kind of have to drive to Grand Rapids, and you have to go to a mall, and you have to buy a new dress,” said Macaluso. “This just provides another option, another opportunity to say, ‘Oh, I have a chance here to help the environment a little bit. So I’m going to take it.’”

Perhaps most importantly, initiatives like these can help others outside the confines of high school prom think about how fashion relates to the environment.

“I think it’s very meaningful, because it starts to engage consumers, especially the young generation,” said Sheng Lu, an associate professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. 

Innovative grassroots efforts have helped cut down on fashion waste locally in other places, and in recent years, major brands have been trying to work out the kinks of reselling used clothes. 

Although the Elk Rapids effort is relatively small, Lu said, it can help inspire local action.

“I honestly was pretty nervous coming in here,” said sophomore Addison Looney, who was shopping with her mom. “But there were a lot of great selections. … I was pretty indecisive about it. But I picked [one] out.”

The dress is a soft lavender with beading in the front. Addison’s mom, Sara, said she was excited to buy her daughter a secondhand dress.

“Knowing this is just a great opportunity to shop local, and to obviously save money,” she said. “But also just the resale aspect of it — to just kind of keep dresses going, because they’re usually a one-time use.”

Macaluso said they’ve been able to stoke interest in buying used clothing. The prom event even led Tinker Tailor — which had mainly been in the business of altering clothes, not selling them — to set up a “Dress Vault” in the store so people could continue consigning, donating, and shopping for secondhand items.

“I think it really just builds off that idea of, ‘Hey, these dresses didn’t go bad, they haven’t expired,’” she said. “And they can find a new home.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At prom, fast fashion slows down on Mar 20, 2024.

Swiss air quality monitoring company IQAir has released its sixth World Air Quality Report, detailing 2023’s most polluted countries and territories in the world.

In compiling the report, more than 30,000 monitoring stations in 134 nations, territories and regions were examined by IQAir scientists, a press release from IQAir said. Of these, 124 — 92.5 percent — exceeded the annual guideline set by the World Health Organization (WHO) for fine particulate matter (PM2.5).

“Causing an estimated one in every nine deaths worldwide, air pollution is the greatest environmental threat to human health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution is responsible for an estimated seven million premature deaths worldwide every year,” IQAir said.

Just seven countries met WHO’s annual PM2.5 guidelines — Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, Iceland, Finland, Grenada and Mauritius.

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Meanwhile, the most polluted countries last year were Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan and Burkina Faso.

“A clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a universal human right. In many parts of the world the lack of air quality data delays decisive action and perpetuates unnecessary human suffering. Air quality data saves lives. Where air quality is reported, action is taken, and air quality improves,” said Frank Hammes, IQAir Global CEO, in the press release.

The most underrepresented continent in the report was Africa, where one-third of the population does not have access to data on air quality. Just 24 of 54 countries on the continent had sufficient monitoring data, IQAir said, as CNN reported.

In Southeast Asia, almost every country saw PM2.5 concentrations rise, with transboundary haze and climate conditions affecting the region.

The planet’s ten most polluted cities in 2023 were all located in Central and South Asia. The four most polluted were in India, with Begusarai taking the top spot.

“We see that in every part of our lives that air pollution has an impact,” Hammes said, as reported by CNN. “And it typically, in some of the most polluted countries, is likely shaving off anywhere between three to six years of people’s lives. And then before that will lead to many years of suffering that are entirely preventable if there’s better air quality.”

In the United States, the most polluted city was Beloit, Wisconsin, while the most polluted major city was Columbus, Ohio, the report said.

On the flipside, the cleanest major U.S. city was Las Vegas.

Fine particulate matter has been linked to many serious health issues.

“Exposure to PM2.5 air pollution leads to and exacerbates numerous health conditions, including but not limited to asthma, cancer, stroke, and lung disease. Additionally, exposure to elevated levels of fine particles can impair cognitive development in children, lead to mental health issues, and complicate existing illnesses including diabetes,” IQAir said.

For the first time, the report found Canada to be North America’s most polluted country with 13 of the most polluted cities in the region located there.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, low-cost sensors were used to gather 70 percent of the air quality data collected in real-time.

“While the number of countries and regions with air quality monitoring has steadily increased over the past six years, there remain significant gaps in government-operated regulatory instrumentation in many parts of the world,” IQAir explained. “Low-cost air quality monitors, sponsored and hosted by citizen scientists, researchers, community advocates, and local organizations, have proven to be valuable tools to reduce gaps in air monitoring networks across the world.”

According to independent air quality monitors, there has been a disproportionate amount of exposure to harmful air among underrepresented and vulnerable groups. Gaps in the monitoring data in places where air quality is likely poor highlight the necessity of expanding global air quality monitoring coverage.

“IQAir’s annual report illustrates the international nature and inequitable consequences of the enduring air pollution crisis. Local, national, and international effort is urgently needed to monitor air quality in under-resourced places, manage the causes of transboundary haze, and cut our reliance on combustion as an energy source,” said Aidan Farrow, Greenpeace International senior air quality scientist, in the press release. “In 2023, air pollution remained a global health catastrophe. IQAir’s global data set provides an important reminder of the resulting injustices and the need to implement the many solutions that exist to this problem.”

The report pointed out that, by changing weather patterns that affect rainfall and wind, the climate crisis has a major influence on air pollution levels, as CNN reported. And as extreme heat events happen more frequently and become increasingly severe, it will lead to increased air pollution.

“We have such a strong overlap of what’s causing our climate crisis and what’s causing air pollution,” Hammes said, as reported by CNN. “Anything that we can do to reduce air pollution will be tremendously impactful in the long term also for improving our climate gas emissions, and vice versa.”

The post Just Seven Countries Met WHO Air Quality Standards in 2023, Data Shows appeared first on EcoWatch.

The nation’s insurance industry has gone haywire in recent years amid a succession of floods, fires, and other climate-fueled disasters. These catastrophes have forced carriers to pay out billions in claims, and many have responded by raising premiums in disaster-prone states like Florida and Oregon or leaving certain markets altogether.

But many of these companies also provide coverage for fossil fuel projects, like pipelines and natural gas power plants, that would never be built without their backing. This gives the insurance industry a unique role on both sides of the climate crisis: insurers are helping make the problem worse by underwriting the very projects that warm the earth even as they bear the costs of mounting climate disasters and pass them on to customers.

Legislation in Connecticut, the capital of the American insurance industry and home to several of its largest carriers, could make insurers pay for that contradiction. If passed, the bill, which just cleared a committee vote in the state senate, would move toward imposing a fee for any fossil-fuel projects companies insure in state. That revenue would go into a public resilience fund that could underwrite sea walls and urban flood protection measures.

“It’s important to begin to hold [insurers] accountable for how they’ve played it both ways in terms of climate change,” said Tom Swan, the executive director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group, an economic justice nonprofit that has joined several environmental organizations in lobbying the legislature to pass the bill along with several environmental organizations. “People are seeing skyrocketing rates, or they’re pulling out of different areas, and they continue to underwrite and invest in fossil fuels at a pace much greater than their colleagues across the globe,” he said. 

The group pushed a more aggressive proposal last year that would have charged insurers a 5 percent fee for any fossil fuel coverage they issued in the United States, but that bill failed after critics raised several legal questions. In particular, the industry argued that the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause prohibits taxing a company’s out-of-state business.

The new version, attached as an amendment to a climate resilience bill proposed by Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, would only require the state to produce a proposal for an insurance mechanism. The surcharge would apply only to fossil-fuel projects these companies insure in Connecticut, avoiding that constitutional challenge.

The assessment would apply not only to new pipelines and fuel terminals, which require ample insurance to attract lenders and investors, but to current coverage for existing infrastructure as well. This means anyone covering the state’s dozens of oil- and gas-fueled power plants would be contributing to the resilience fund. A report from Connecticut Citizen Action Group and several other environmental nonprofits found that the state’s insurers have together invested $221 billion in fossil fuels.

Supporters argue the reduced fee would still raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for climate resilience. Connecticut received about $318 million in FEMA disaster aid between 2011 and 2021, or about $149 in spending per capita, according to the climate adaptation nonprofit Rebuild by Design. That puts the state well below disaster-prone locales like Louisiana, which saw $1,736 in federal disaster aid per capita, but far above those like Delaware that haven’t experienced a major disaster in the past decade.

Eric George, the president of the Insurance Association of Connecticut, the state’s largest insurance trade association, said the organization would “strongly oppose” any surcharge, but added that he was still studying the bill.

The legislation comes as other states, including Vermont and Maryland, introduce “polluters pay” bills to hold oil producers accountable for climate damages. Connecticut’s proposed law is an iteration of that effort focused on an area where state regulators wield significant influence, said Risalat Khan of the Sunrise Project, a nonprofit focused on energy transition policy. 

“People are very directly seeing their premiums rise, in relation to climate disasters,” he said. “There’s a direct question there of, why aren’t state level regulators using more of their power to take local action?”

The significance of this financing mechanism could vary from state to state, says Benjamin Keys, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on climate insurance risks. 

“One major issue is that the fuels are collected and burned everywhere, but the pain of natural disasters is local in nature,” he said. Because of that, he questioned whether the financing mechanism “would be feasible for all communities to emulate, because many places have [lots of] disasters hit, but very little in the way of fossil fuel production.” Florida, for instance, doesn’t have much more fossil-fuel infrastructure than Connecticut, but faces extreme weather and other catastrophes far more often.

Even though the legislation is weaker than the previous version, supporters say passing it in the home of the country’s insurance industry would send a message to big companies that are still underwriting oil and gas projects.

“I think it’s a good policy, but from a narrative-setting perspective, it’s really important,” said Swan.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Connecticut wants to penalize insurers for backing fossil-fuel projects on Mar 19, 2024.

Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stop the construction of a copper mine in Arizona on land sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe as well as other Indigenous nations. Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, also known as Oak Flat, sits atop the third largest copper deposit on the planet and is essential to green energy projects. The operation, which will be run by Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP, will leave a crater nearly 1,000 feet deep and 2 miles wide.

“Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us — our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families and our land,” said Wendsler Noise of Apache Stronghold, a nonprofit fighting to protect the area. “We vow to appeal to the Supreme Court.” 

Over the years, Oak Flat has developed a storied history. In 2014, Oak Flat was a part of a military spending bill that would allow the government to “swap” the area with other land in Arizona. In 2016, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in an attempt to protect it, and in 2021 the Apache Stronghold sued the government, arguing that the land was reserved for the Western Apaches in an 1852 treaty. Then, in 2023, Apache Stronghold made the case that the land transfer would keep them from exercising their religion. The court disagreed. 

The issue before the court illustrates a battle between religion, Indigenous rights, and potential solutions to the climate crisis. For tribal nations like the San Carlos Apache who practice what are known as “land-based religions” — ceremonial practices that are inextricably tied to areas Indigenous peoples have relationships with — preserving those lands with religious significance is paramount to the survival, and transmission, of both culture and values to the next generation. 

But for developers, the proposed mine would support a few thousand jobs for the surrounding community, inject $61 billion into the local economy, and provide a critical supply of copper for everything from electric vehicles to energy storage systems. By 2031, the world will need almost 37 million metric tons of copper to continue the process of green-energy electrification. Resolution Copper said that Oak Flat could provide a quarter of U.S. copper production. 

At the heart of Apache Stronghold’s legal case is something called “substantial burden” — there must be proof that the government has interfered with an individual’s right to practice their religious beliefs. Substantial burden protects U.S. citizens from government interference, unless the government has a really good reason. That means Apache Stronghold’s claim needs to be justified with a high level of scrutiny. 

If the case goes to the Supreme Court, and Apache Stronghold wins, the federal government would need to show a compelling reason to destroy Oak Flat. 

“If the Supreme Court finds that land transfer of Oak Flat is a substantial burden on Apache religious practice, then the court sends the case back down to the lower court,” said Beth Margaret Wright, who is from the Pueblo of Laguna and is an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. “Then that would be on the government to prove that the land transfer is narrowly tailored toward a compelling government interest.”

Wright said that’s a pretty high bar for the government to meet, and it’s complicated by the court’s history with land-based religions.

According to the court’s recent decision, Oak Flat is similar to an older case out of California: Lyng v. The Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association. In the 1980s, the United States Forest Service was sued by the Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association over the proposed construction of a road. The Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa tribes argued the road would irreparably damage an area where tribal members conducted religious ceremonies. 

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could do what it wanted with its land and said that the government couldn’t be held responsible for the religious needs of its citizens — a kind of “slippery slope” that recognized that a favorable ruling for the tribes would provide a veto button for other Indigenous nations on public projects in the future. In its ruling, the Supreme Court acknowledged that there were deeply held religious beliefs tied to the land, but the road was built anyway. 

Joe Davis, an attorney with Becket Law, the firm defending Apache Stronghold, said the narrow focus on Lyng is what is at issue with Oak Flat: He says it’s the wrong framing.

Five years after the Lyng decision, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, was passed. Because RFRA was written to expand religious protections, the Apache Stronghold seeks the expanded protections under RFRA to be applied to Oak Flat. 

“This is a case, at its heart, about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which uses different language and is broader than the First Amendment,” said Davis.

And that argument has some history with the courts. In 2012, Becket also defended Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court and won using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In that case, the court decided that under RFRA, the family that owns Hobby Lobby could opt out of providing birth control to employees under federal insurance laws due to religious beliefs. Essentially, the court found that the federal government was imposing a substantial burden because the use of birth control violated the owners’ religious freedoms. 

“Hobby Lobby shows that RFRA is very powerful,” said Davis. “This case is an opportunity for the Supreme Court to make good on the promise of RFRA.” 

The Ninth Circuit decided that in Oak Flat, substantial burden wasn’t met, citing the Lyng case. But the Lyng case doesn’t define substantial burden, RFRA does, and Davis argues that the court made a leap applying substantial burden when the concept wasn’t used in the Lyng case. Basically, the court didn’t use the broad protections offered by RFRA and instead applied a ruling from a pre-RFRA world.

If the case gets picked up by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Apache Stronghold wins, this would help clarify substantial burden. But with that clarity, there may come many more legal battles testing the limits of the First Amendment for Indigenous peoples. 

“It might help us in the sense that now a substantial burden is more encompassing of land-based religions,” said Beth Margaret Wright with the Native American Rights Fund. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that our land-based religions and practices are forever protected.” 

A spokesperson with the U.S. Forest Service, the agency named in the lawsuit, declined to comment citing ongoing litigation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The massive copper mine that could test the limits of religious freedom on Mar 19, 2024.

Did you know only 90 companies account for two-thirds of the industrial CO2 (carbon dioxide)…

The post We Earthlings: 90 Companies Account for 2/3 of Global CO2 Emissions appeared first on Earth911.

Orca whales are familiar residents of West Coast waters. The black and white marine mammals are often seen swimming in groups, diving and slapping their tails against the water’s surface.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) believe that a group of 49 killer whales seen hunting sperm whales and other marine animals in the ocean off the coasts of Oregon and California may be a separate population, a press release from UBC said.

The researchers said the orcas could be a unique oceanic population or part of a transient killer whale subpopulation.

“The open ocean is the largest habitat on our planet and observations of killer whales in the high seas are rare,” said Josh McInnes, lead author of the study and a UBC masters student at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF), in the press release. “In this case, we’re beginning to get a sense of killer whale movements in the open ocean and how their ecology and behaviour differs from populations inhabiting coastal areas.”

There are three killer whale ecotypes living in waters off the Oregon and California coasts — “offshores,” “residents” and “transients.”

According to the researchers, the unidentified orcas have been seen previously. The study puts together information gathered during nine encounters from 1997 to 2021.

“It’s pretty unique to find a new population. It takes a long time to gather photos and observations to recognize that there’s something different about these killer whales,” said study co-author Dr. Andrew Trites, a professor at IOF, in the press release.

Descriptions and photos did not match any of the group of 49 with known orcas.

“In one of the first encounters researchers had with a pod of these oceanic killer whales, they were observed taking on a herd of nine adult female sperm whales, eventually making off with one. It is the first time killer whales have been reported to attack sperm whales on the west coast,” McInnes said in the press release. “Other encounters include an attack on a pygmy sperm whale, predation on a northern elephant seal and Risso’s dolphin, and what appeared to be a post-meal lull after scavenging a leatherback turtle.”

Based on shark bite scars seen on nearly all the orcas in the new group, the research team believes they mostly live in the deep ocean far from the coast.

“The presence of cookiecutter shark wounds provides indirect evidence that these unknown killer whales had spent time in warmer oceanic waters,” the study said, as The Canadian Press reported.

The killer whales are also physically distinct from the three principal ecotypes in their white or grey patches next to the fin — known as “saddle patches” — and their dorsal fins.

“While the sizes and shapes of the dorsal fins and saddle patches are similar to transient and offshore ecotypes, the shape of their fins varied, from pointed like transients to rounded like offshore killer whales,” McInnes said in the press release. “Their saddle patch patterns also differed, with some having large uniformly gray saddle patches and others having smooth narrow saddle patches similar to those seen in killer whales in tropical regions.”

The study, “Evidence for an Oceanic Population of Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) in Offshore Waters of California and Oregon,” was published in the journal Aquatic Mammals.

Trites said birding and whale watching expedition passengers, as well as fishers, gave them additional observations of the unidentified whales.

The research team hopes to document acoustic data, genetic information and more sightings to continue their investigation into the differences between these whales and known populations.

“We’re just kind of at the tip of the iceberg of what these whales are doing. I mean, are they all one population? Are they multiple? We don’t know. So, I feel like this is kind of the big start of the next steps in our research, and to maybe get more sightings and more information,” said McInnes, as reported by The Canadian Press.

The post Orcas Spotted in Northeastern Pacific Ocean Could Be New Population appeared first on EcoWatch.

According to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), February 2024 was the planet’s ninth consecutive record-warm month.

February’s average global temperature on land and the ocean’s surface was 2.52 degrees Fahrenheit above the century’s average of 53.8 degrees Fahrenheit — the warmest February in the 175-year NOAA planetary climate record.

“Temperatures were warmer to much-warmer-than-average across the Arctic with the exception of much of Greenland to northern Iceland, and parts of the North Atlantic,” NOAA said. “Above-average to much-above-average temperatures also covered almost all of North America, most of western Europe into western Asia, most of South America, Africa and Australia. Record warm February temperatures affected many parts of Europe, South America, and in the southern half of Africa.”

North and South America and Europe broke February temperature records, while it was the second-warmest February ever recorded in Africa, a NOAA press release said.

It was also the warmest meteorological winter — December 2030 to February 2024 — on record in the Northern Hemisphere and the warmest meteorological summer in the Southern Hemisphere. The global surface temperature was 2.45 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the 20th century.

“Record-warm temperatures covered approximately 13.8% of the world’s surface this February, which was the highest percentage for February since the start of records in 1951, and 7.4% higher than the previous February record in 1986,” NOAA said.

Sea surface temperatures were warmer than average for much of the western, northern and equatorial Pacific Ocean, the tropical and northeastern Atlantic Ocean and large portions of the Indian Ocean.

There is a 45 percent likelihood that this year will be the warmest in NOAA’s record-keeping history, as well as a 99 percent chance 2024 will be among the top five hottest years.

Ice coverage worldwide was also low, according to the report.

“Global sea ice extent (coverage) was the fourth smallest in the 46-year record, at 460,000 square miles below the 1991–2020 average. Arctic sea ice extent was slightly below average (by 100,000 square miles), whereas Antarctic sea ice extent was substantially below average (by 370,000 square miles), ranking second smallest on record,” reported NOAA.

Weather activity in the tropics was also heightened in February, with 11 named storms around the world — above the average of seven for the period 1991 to 2020. Just two of the storms made landfall, in northern Australia.

Just one tropical cyclone — Djoungou — spun in the central Indian Ocean, away from land. The Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans did not see any active storms, save for Akara — a weak tropical cyclone in the South Atlantic. Akara was notable, however, since tropical storm development there is usually inhibited by atmospheric conditions.

Copernicus Climate Change Service Director Carlo Buentempo commented that the record-breaking temperatures in February were “not really surprising,” reported Earth.Org.

“The climate responds to the actual concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so, unless we manage to stabilise those, we will inevitably face new global temperature records and their consequences,” said Buentempo.

The post February Was Ninth Consecutive Month of Record-Breaking Global Temperatures appeared first on EcoWatch.

A new study warns that athletes playing sports on artificial turf could become covered in per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, present in the turf.

Researchers from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) conducted a small-scale study of young athletes, as well as their coaches, who played soccer on an artificial turf field. The results showed that three out of four people on the artificial turf had an increase in the amount of PFAS on their skin, while those who played on real grass fields did not have increases in PFAS levels on the skin. 

On one player, the amount of PFAS on the skin after playing on the artificial turf more than doubled the amount on the player’s skin tested before playing, The Guardian reported.

“Although this was a preliminary study, it raises red flags and calls for additional studies to determine what risk there is of dermal absorption of PFAS from artificial turf,” Kyla Bennett, science policy director for PEER, said in a press release.

According to Bennett, athletes playing on artificial turf could inhale or ingest PFAS or absorb these chemicals through skin contact.

“It’s also important to note that knowledge of dermal uptake of PFAS is severely lacking, but it may be a significant exposure pathway,” Bennett said.

PFAS, or forever chemicals, are synthetic chemicals that may never break down in the environment. Scientists are still conducting more research on how PFAS affect human health and the environment, but previous studies show these chemicals could be linked to negative reproductive impacts, developmental impacts in children or even increased risks of certain types of cancer.

While the findings of the study are preliminary, they do highlight the pervasiveness of PFAS and provide additional research on PFAS in faux grass. In 2019, lab tests showed PFAS in the backing of artificial turf and fluorine in the plastic-based blades of fake grass, which could indicate PFAS in the faux grass blades, as reported by The Intercept.

Artificial turf is often used for sports fields to reduce maintenance needs, or it may be used in drought-prone areas as an alternative to real grass that requires a lot of water. PFAS are common in waterproof or weatherproof products, including artificial turf, and can be found in the many layers that make up this kind of ground cover.

The issue of PFAS in artificial grass was brought up recently in the California legislature, when lawmakers proposed banning PFAS in synthetic turf. The bill was vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2023, as the governor noted that the bill did not name a regulatory agency to enforce the ban, Cal Matters reported.

According to PEER, there are about 12,000 to 13,000 sports fields with artificial turf in the U.S. But aside from concerns about PFAS exposure for humans, Bennett noted that these so-called forever chemicals can also leach into local environments.

“In 2024, the last thing we should be doing is putting down acres of a plastic fossil fuel product… with chemicals that are going to get all over athletes’ skin, and into soil and water,” Bennett told The Guardian. “It just boggles my mind that people are still considering using this stuff.”

The post Playing on Artificial Turf Could Cover Athletes in PFAS, Study Says appeared first on EcoWatch.