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For some, adopting a gluten-free lifestyle is a choice. For others, like those living with…
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With the holiday season fast approaching, parents around the world are deciding which new toys to purchase for their kids this year. Many will opt for classic favorites like Lego bricks, Mr. Potato Heads, Jenga sets, and Barbie dolls. Others will choose toys with more high-tech flair — like remote-controlled robotic dogs, light-up drones, or books that play animal sounds — for that tot who loves smashing buttons.
But while modern parents are bombarded with ads for toys that light up, make sounds, move under their own power, and respond to voice commands, they don’t hear much about the environmental crisis fueled by electronic toys, or e-toys.
According to a recent report by the WEEE Forum, a multinational nonprofit organization focused on the management of “waste electrical and electronic equipment,” the world threw out more than 7 billion e-toys in 2022. Many, if not most, of these toys didn’t reach a proper e-waste recycling facility due to a dearth of regulations and consumer awareness that toys containing batteries and circuit boards require special disposal. Instead, experts believe these toys are often winding up in the regular trash, increasing the risk of battery fires at waste management facilities and creating new environmental hazards at landfills. Even when people want to recycle their e-toys properly, recyclers might not want to take them because they are hard to deconstruct and often contain very little material worth recycling.
Ultimately, experts say, toy makers and toy retailers must take more responsibility for e-toy waste — whether that’s by setting up take-back programs for broken e-toys, redesigning toys to be more recycling friendly, or embracing new business models that replace cheap, throwaway toys with stuff that’s built to last.
There’s no doubt our appetite for electronic toys is growing: Revenue from wholesale shipments of e-toys into the United States increased nearly 200 percent between 2010 and 2022, according to data from the Consumer Technology Association. Yet as e-toys proliferate, we seem to be valuing them less. In recent years, “toys have gone from being viewed more as essential tools to childhood development to junk you get at the holidays,” said Krystal Persaud, an award-winning toy designer and the cofounder of Wildgrid, an educational marketplace that uses game-like principles to help consumers learn how to implement home electrification projects. “Which is very unfortunate.” (Persaud was selected as a Grist 50 Fixer in 2023.)
Indeed, the pressure toy makers feel to make sales — particularly during the holiday season, when they earn a large chunk of their annual revenue — motivates them to constantly churn out new toys. Persaud described it as “very analogous to fast fashion.”
“It’s very trend driven,” she told Grist.
One of the ways a toy maker can stay trendy is by giving their toys new capabilities with embedded electronics. According to Persaud, the cost of manufacturing electronic components like circuit boards has fallen so much in the last several decades that it’s now relatively easy to incorporate them into the simplest and cheapest of toys, which is how parents end up with plastic trucks that bark sounds and flash lights.
The problem with cheap electronic toys is that they aren’t necessarily built to last, be repaired, or even have their batteries removed and replaced. As a result, many e-toys will inevitably become junk in somebody’s basement or garage until it’s time to get rid of them. At that point, e-toys “are going to end up most likely in the municipal solid waste system rather than the recycling stream,” said Callie Babbitt, a e-waste researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
That’s a problem both for safety and environmental reasons. E-toys with lithium-ion batteries can spark a fire if the battery is mishandled, crushed or punctured at a waste management facility. Once they enter landfills, electronics create additional hazards because some of their components contain toxic substances like lead, mercury, and cadmium that can leach into the surrounding soil and water, endangering the health of nearby communities and ecosystems.
The reason dead e-toys aren’t getting to the right place, Babbitt says, has to do with e-waste regulations. In the U.S., there’s no overarching federal guidance on how to manage e-waste, which is instead regulated through a patchwork of state policies. In roughly half of U.S. states, the policy is no policy at all. Most of the other states have some sort of “extended producer responsibility” scheme that requires electronic device manufacturers to pay funds into a program administered by state or local officials or private entities. Those funds go toward collecting specific electronics on a state collection list and sending them to e-waste recyclers. Not a single state collection list includes e-toys. “They’re not traditionally part of that system,” Babbitt said.
In many cases, consumers can still drop off e-toys at e-waste collection sites. But Babbitt says that “most of the effort toward actually communicating about recycling” is geared toward items on the state list, meaning consumer awareness about how to recycle e-toys is relatively low. And in some states, like Minnesota, consumers might have to pay a collection facility to take their junk toys, according to Maria Jensen, who co-directs a Minnesota-based nonprofit called Recycling Electronics for Climate Action that advocates for stronger e-waste recycling policies.
Often, county governments — which run many of Minnesota’s e-waste collection sites — “are not supported well enough to afford to collect and send those to a recycler,” Jensen told Grist. “So what happens is they charge the consumer.” While about a quarter of the e-waste Minnesotans generate is collected for recycling, Jensen speculates that the amount of e-toy waste collected is much lower.
Outside of the U.S., different countries have very different e-waste policies. But when it comes to e-toys, a similar pattern emerges globally: These devices are not reaching recyclers. While between 20 and 30 percent of large electronics like TVs and printers are recycled on a global scale, the global recycling rate for e-toys is closer to 10 percent, said Kees Baldé, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. Baldé co-authored the recent WEEE Forum report that identified e-toys as the largest contributor to “invisible” e-waste, a category that included 9 million tons of electronics last year.
Invisible e-waste, which the report authors defined as types of e-waste with a very low recycling rate based on national data, also includes vapes, headphones, home smoke detectors, and other small consumer electronics. “Basically people don’t really know what to do” with e-toys and other forms of invisible e-waste, Baldé told Grist.
Worldwide, Baldé says, these products are only sometimes covered by extended producer responsibility schemes. Because they are often made of cheap materials like plastic with only small amounts of the precious metals that e-waste recyclers make money recovering and selling, recyclers tend to lose money processing them. “The treatment of e-waste, in particular this type of e-waste, is worthless,” Balde said.
The way e-toys are designed creates additional challenges for recyclers. Whereas TVs and computers tend to follow similar design principles and include similar components, toys come in a huge variety of sizes and form factors that recyclers may not be familiar with, meaning additional time and effort must be spent figuring out how to take them apart. What’s more, many are not built to be disassembled. More than a nuisance, this can be a hazard for recyclers, who may not be aware that a toy with no screws, charge ports, or obvious external labels contains a lithium-ion battery.
Frequently, e-toy batteries are “completely encased in plastic,” Jensen said. “So you actually have to break it open, physically, to get the battery out.” Otherwise, that battery could accidentally enter a recycler’s shredder and spark a fire.
To solve the e-toy waste crisis, experts say that regulators and the toy industry need to step up. Governments could expand their extended producer responsibility schemes to include more categories of electronics, such as e-toys. While this wouldn’t address design issues, it would provide the municipalities, nonprofits, or private businesses that collect e-waste much-needed funding to get these items to a recycler that can handle them. Toy manufacturers, or big box retailers like Walmart and Target, could serve as collection points for old e-toys, similar to how Best Buy stores collect a variety of consumer electronics and appliances for recycling. Persaud, the toy designer, suspects that retailers setting up e-toy take-back programs “would be the fastest” way to start collecting dead toys en masse.
The Toy Association, an industry group whose members account for 93 percent of toy and game sales in the U.S., didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.
In the longer term, design standards focused on longevity and repairability could slow the tide of waste by ensuring e-toys are built to last longer. The European Union recently adopted a new regulation that requires manufacturers of portable electronics to make their products’ batteries removable — an important first step. Baldé wants to see the bloc go much further. “We need more policy interventions to simply ban these products that don’t have a minimum guaranteed lifespan or can’t be repaired,” he said.
Finally, we all need to reframe our relationship with toys and stop treating them as disposable. While consumers can’t solve this problem alone, we can all be more mindful about the type and quantity of toys we buy. Parents, Persaud suggests, can ask friends and family for the type of toys they want their children to receive, perhaps requesting e-toys only when the electronics give the toy “a superpower that wasn’t there before.” Or they can stick to secondhand, analog, or even homemade toys made of highly recyclable materials like wood.
Persaud emphasized that kids, especially young children, don’t need their toys to have interactive buttons and light-up features in order to have fun with them. “There’s a lot of things you can do without [the toy] being electronic,” Persaud said. “Just with blocks, with paper. You can really play with anything.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Discarded toys are creating an e-waste disaster. Here’s how to stop it. on Nov 22, 2023.
Taylor Swift’s show at an open-air stadium in Rio de Janeiro this past Friday was supposed to be a raucous kickoff to the pop star’s first concert tour in Brazil. Instead, fans across the world were left reeling after a concertgoer died from extreme heat minutes into Swift’s Eras Tour performance.
Ana Clara Benevides Machado, 23, traveled 880 miles and waited in line outside for more than eight hours, along with tens of thousands of other fans, to see her favorite artist. That day, the heat index, or “feels-like” temperature accounting for humidity, soared to an all-time high of 138 degrees Fahrenheit in Rio. Brazil was sweltering through its eighth heat wave of the year — and it’s only spring. More than 1,000 people fainted from heat exhaustion inside the venue; others were vomiting.
Benevides lost consciousness just minutes into the set, during the song “Cruel Summer,” and later died of cardiac arrest at a nearby hospital.
Researchers have documented how hot weather vastly increases the risk of heart failure and other cardiovascular issues. Concertgoers say Time for Fun, the Brazil-based entertainment company running the event, refused to let people bring in water despite the heat and blocked air vents in the venue to prevent people outside from listening in. Swift postponed her second show in Rio, originally scheduled for Saturday, to Monday night, citing safety concerns due to the ongoing high temperatures. She also put out a statement on Instagram saying she was “devastated” by Benevides’ death. “This is the last thing I ever thought would happen when we decided to bring this tour to Brazil,” Swift wrote. (Time for Fun did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The Swift concert disaster comes on the heels of a summer where fans experienced heat illness at a Beyoncé concert in Maryland and at an Ed Sheeran concert in Pittsburgh. These incidents serve as a stark reminder of the dangers of extreme heat, which will only grow worse as heat waves intensify as a result of climate change. But they also demonstrate that event mismanagement and a lack of heat preparedness can be deadly. Most heat-related deaths and illnesses, including at concerts and other large events, are preventable, climate health and heat safety experts told Grist. To avoid future injuries, concert organizers should take steps to proactively plan for heat, communicate health advisories and safety measures in advance, provide water and onsite medical care, and ensure proper airflow and ventilation.
“People go to these events to have fun. You never go to one of these thinking something horrible is going to happen,” Kevin Kloesel, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Oklahoma, told Grist. “So it’s incumbent upon the event organizers to make sure that it is the safest environment possible.”
Kloesel, who oversees weather forecasting and safety for around 400 annual outdoor events at the University of Oklahoma, said that when it comes to extreme heat, event organizers need to provide three key things: shade, hydration, and air movement. For example, setting up canopies to shade the endless lines concertgoers stood in for hours in Rio would have been one easy way to cool people down. Having enough water on hand, and providing it to attendees for free, is also crucial. Organizers should also find ways to ventilate the event space, including, potentially, by reducing seat capacity.
Morgan Zabow, a community heat and health information coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, specified that indoor venues should provide air conditioning and not rely solely on electric fans, which can make stifling conditions worse by blowing hot air at a faster rate.
Event organizers should also send out health advisories via text message or email well in advance, Zabow said. Those messages could include heat forecasts and tips to stay cool, like regularly drinking water and avoiding sugary beverages, caffeine, and alcohol, which can inhibit the body’s ability to cool off. Wearing loose, light-colored clothing is another preventative measure advisories could recommend.
But even with these precautions, heat can still take a toll, especially for people who are older or have pre-existing medical conditions, or those from cooler climates who aren’t used to hot weather. That’s why having easily accessible medical staff onsite is so important, Kloesel said. At football games, Kloesel and University of Oklahoma staff arrange cooling tents with medical personnel around the field in case attendees fall ill.
There are also ways to avoid the heat altogether. In Arizona, it’s become increasingly common to delay sports practices and other events until later in the evening when it cools off, said Ladd Keith, a heat policy expert and professor of urban planning at the University of Arizona. Kloesel noted that if concerts created more reserved seating, people wouldn’t have to line up outside for hours to secure a spot. Canceling or postponing events, as Swift did for her second concert in Rio, is another option. Organizers can also consider shifting summer events to a cooler season like fall or winter. All these steps, experts stress, require careful and intentional planning far in advance.
Individuals can take steps to stay safe, too. Keith noted that heat can affect anyone, including young people and those in good health — as the Taylor Swift concert demonstrated. Zabow suggested using a buddy system in which friends monitor one another for symptoms of heat exhaustion, including heavy sweating, dizziness, and nausea, and leave early to get help if needed. “I know it’s hard to leave a stadium early and miss things, but your life is so much more important,” she said.
At Swift’s concert on Friday, however, attendees said Time for Fun had blocked exits, making it difficult to leave. The company announced new measures to provide water and emergency responders Saturday morning. Meanwhile, Brazil’s consumer protection agency has announced that the federal government plans to investigate Time for Fun.
“It is heartbreaking that preventable things happened,” Kloesel said. “You have to know your venue, you have to know your fans, and you have to have a way of taking care of them and mitigating that risk as much as you possibly can, rather than just leaving it to chance.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat led to a Taylor Swift fan’s death in Brazil. Could it have been prevented? on Nov 22, 2023.
Sounds affect our daily lives, from birdsong and soothing melodies to jackhammers and jet engines.
People who live in urban environments are often affected by noise pollution, but, due to systemic injustice, some are impacted more than others. And it not only affects humans, but wildlife as well.
A new study by acoustic ecologists from Colorado State University (CSU) has found that marginalized communities are subjected to more urban noise that is louder, and that this exposure has been associated with negative outcomes for humans and wildlife.
“Understanding how systemic biases influence local ecological communities is essential for developing just and equitable environmental practices that prioritize both human and wildlife well-being. With over 270 million residents inhabiting urban areas in the United States, the socioecological consequences of racially targeted zoning, such as redlining, need to be considered in urban planning,” the authors of the study wrote. “We found strong evidence to indicate that noise is inequitably distributed in redlined urban communities across the United States, and that inequitable noise may drive complex biological responses across diverse urban wildlife, reinforcing the interrelatedness of socioecological outcomes.”
The study, “Inequalities in noise will affect urban wildlife,” was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Sara Bombaci, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at CSU, said that, because people derive benefits from wildlife and nature, ecological degradation compounds the injustices against people living in areas that were formerly redlined, a press release from CSU said. Redlining is now illegal, but it was the practice of discriminatorily denying services or loans to residents of non-white neighborhoods.
“We need to be thinking more about how these systemic injustices and problems are manifesting to shape ecology and evolution,” Bombaci said in the press release.
The researchers looked at the distribution of urban noise in 83 cities in the United States across historical racial divisions. They also examined hundreds of studies on how noise impacts wildlife.
The findings of the study — the first to evaluate noise inequality in redlined communities — were that louder levels of noise are more commonly found in redlined urban areas, and that they detrimentally affect urban ecosystems in proportion to their volume.
Beginning in 1933, grades were assigned to neighborhoods by the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation based on wealth and race. Neighborhoods deemed “grade A” were richer and whiter, while “grade D” neighborhoods with residents from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds had red lines drawn around them. In 1968, redlining was made illegal, but disparities endured in these communities due to decades of divestment.
The research team found that there was a 17 percent higher maximum level of noise in grade D neighborhoods than in grade A neighborhoods. Grades C and D neighborhoods were also more often found to have maximum noise levels higher than the level known to lead to physical pain, hearing loss and stress in humans.
“This is directly linked to structural racism,” Bombaci said. “There’s a clear signal that ties directly to whether these communities were redlined.”
Effects on human health caused by noise pollution include insomnia, stress, hypertension and an increased risk of stroke and heart disease. Persistent loud noise is taxing on wildlife as well. It can affect animal communication, distribution, community structure, foraging, fitness, movement, mating and reproduction. Noise can cause animals to avoid particular areas and can cause some species to be more vulnerable to predators.
Denver is one of many cities that are working toward equitable urban planning in order to improve access to green space and parks in underserved communities. Bombaci pointed out that noise should be a consideration in those plans.
“If we’re adding green space without mitigating impacts of noise, we might not be fully recognizing the benefits of these green spaces,” Bombaci said in the press release.
Bombaci added that continued noise pollution means wildlife may not recover in urban green spaces, but urban planning, noise mitigation and conservation funding can be helpful.
The post Urban Noise Pollution Impacts Marginalized Communities and Wildlife Excessively, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.
A new study has found that lead exposure is more deadly than previous estimates, with about 5.5 million adults dying from cardiovascular disease linked to lead exposure in 2019 alone.
People have long known that high exposures of lead are dangerous. And since the 1970s, we’ve known that even minimal lead exposure can be harmful, PBS reported. Lead exposure is especially known for being harmful for children, as lead can cause negative impacts on brain and nervous system development, according to the World Health Organization.
But a new study, published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health, has found that adult cardiovascular deaths linked to lead exposure in 2019 were more than six times higher than previous estimates, NPR reported.
Even with a decline in blood lead levels, the study authors were able to determine significant health and economic impacts. In addition to the estimates of adults deaths, the researchers estimated that children 5 years and under around the world lost a total of 765 million intelligence quotient (IQ) points. Further, the authors wrote that the global economic impact of lead exposure in 2019 was about $6 trillion, making up nearly 7% of the global gross domestic product.
The impacts were particularly significant in low- and middle-income countries, which had about 5 million, or over 90%, of total adult cardiovascular disease deaths linked to lead exposure.
According to these estimates, the authors said that global lead exposure was similar to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) in terms of health and economic impacts.
The study revealed that while efforts to reduce lead exposure through products like paint or leaded gasoline are important, there are still other sources of exposure that need to be considered.
“Many people believe that with the phase-out of leaded gasoline, the problem was solved,” Ernesto Sánchez-Triana, study co-author and the global lead for pollution management and circular economy at World Bank, told NPR. “What we have shown is that no, the problem is far away from solved.”
Other sources of lead exposure can vary globally. A separate 2019 study identified lead sources by country, with many countries experiencing lead exposure through electronic waste, ceramics, industrial emissions, and batteries.
In all, the research revealed ongoing, serious implications of lead exposure that persist globally, for people of all ages.
“Reducing environmental lead exposure has almost immediate benefits for young children in terms of preventing cognitive impairment. Reducing exposure also has long-term cardiovascular disease benefits in adulthood for children of all ages. However, it remains unknown to what extent reducing exposure can also benefit today’s adults who have had lifelong lead exposure,” the Lancet Planetary Health study concluded.
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The landmark Paris climate agreement called for nations to keep global temperature increase to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, with an aspiration of limiting it to 1.5 degrees C above the preindustrial average. The benchmarks are supposed to stave off some of the worst effects of climate change. But even if countries fulfill their decarbonization pledges in the coming decades, their emissions trajectories put those targets well out of reach, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme.
If countries fully implemented their plans to cut carbon emissions as currently promised under the Paris Agreement framework, the planet will still warm 2.9 degrees Celsius, or 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Assuming a world in which countries also meet their current goals to zero out net carbon emissions in the coming decades, temperatures will still increase about 2.5 degrees C, or 4.5 degrees F, according to the analysis.
“Even in the most optimistic scenario considered in this report, the chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is only 14 percent, and the various scenarios leave open a large possibility that global warming exceeds 2 degrees Celsius or even 3 degrees Celsius,” the report noted.
The analysis found that global emissions need to drop by more than a quarter to keep warming to 2 degrees C in the next seven years. To meet the more ambitious 1.5-degree target, emissions will need to fall by more than 40 percent by 2030. Those cuts should largely come from developed countries and high-income households, which are responsible for the bulk of emissions, the report noted. About 10 percent of individuals contribute to nearly half of all emissions globally.
The emissions gap report is an annual assessment conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme and published in the lead-up to the United Nations climate conference, or COP, which is scheduled to begin at the end of this month in Dubai. It is the most robust analysis of where greenhouse gas emissions are headed under current policies — and where they need to be headed to limit warming. Researchers assess the pledges made by countries under the Paris Agreement and estimate the emissions reductions that are likely if they are fulfilled.
The report’s findings are particularly significant this year because countries are set to conduct the first-ever “global stocktake” since the Paris Agreement was ratified in 2016. When countries signed on to the international treaty, they agreed to a number of goals, including reducing carbon emissions to limit warming and providing financial assistance to developing countries. The stocktake is an inventory of how much progress countries have made toward these goals.
The emissions assessment emphasizes that the world is off track in its quest to accomplish the aims of that agreement. It supports a number of recent analyses suggesting that the 1.5-degree goal is increasingly out of reach.
“It does underscore the need for a robust response to the global stocktake,” said Taryn Fransen, a climate policy expert at the nonprofit World Resources Institute and a lead author of the report. “The question is, politically, what do countries do about this at COP28?”
Fransen said she hoped the findings in the report would drive countries to agree to more ambitious emissions reductions at the climate conference later this month. A strong outcome might include language agreeing to transition away from the use of fossil fuels, dramatically increase the use of renewable energy, double energy efficiency, and boost finance to developing nations experiencing the worst effects of climate change, she added.
The report does highlight a few bright spots in the climate landscape. For one, pledges by countries have become more ambitious since the Paris Agreement was signed. Current pledges include 10 percent more reductions in emissions compared to the initial pledges submitted. Countries are also increasingly implementing the policies that they promised to. In recent years, the United States has passed legislation that is expected to cut its emissions by at least a third, and the European Union has passed a slew of measures that could help it meet its 2030 goal ahead of schedule.
“Countries are getting closer to actually achieving the goals they set out,” said Fransen. “That’s the good news. The bad news is those goals are not sufficient. They’re just not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.”
Given the low likelihood that warming will be contained to 1.5 degrees, the report emphasized the need for techniques to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Methods such as afforestation and storing carbon dioxide in geological formations, soil, and marine and coastal ecosystems are increasingly becoming crucial, the report argues.
“The expanded use of carbon dioxide removal is unavoidable if the Paris Agreement long-term temperature goal is to remain within reach,” the report said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world is careening toward 3 degrees of warming, UN says ahead of climate conference on Nov 21, 2023.
