What you are wearing came with an environmental and social cost that isn’t necessarily reflected…
The post Earth911 Inspiration: Fashion is Far From Cheap appeared first on Earth911.
The collapse of negotiations at the 2009 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, had repercussions that have shaped international climate finance to this day. Rich countries like the United States and much of Europe, which are responsible for the vast majority of historical carbon emissions, refused to back a strong commitment to limit global warming, despite the furious objections of poorer nations who were already suffering from the effects of climate change.
Instead, as a kind of consolation prize, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a vague promise to ramp up aid for decarbonization and disaster response in less fortunate countries around the world. She proposed that wealthy nations would send $100 billion in climate finance to poorer nations every year by 2020. The $100 billion number was far below the true need in those poorer nations, but it was adopted by negotiators and today is still the largest-ever financial commitment for climate change.
More than a decade later, developed countries only now seem to be fulfilling that promise. Preliminary data revealed this week in a new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, indicate that the $100 billion goal may have finally been met in 2022. However, this comes after the countries blew through their initial 2020 deadline; in 2021, wealthy nations only provided around $90 billion of climate finance to the developing world, even as climate-driven disasters wreak havoc on poorer nations in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The United States in particular is lagging behind. If it was to pay a share equivalent to its historical carbon emissions, the country would be responsible for nearly half of the $100 billion; it has contributed just a fraction of that.
The majority of the funding provided still comes in the form of loans that developing nations must repay. Wealthy nations have also spent far more money on climate mitigation projects like solar farms than they have on adaptation projects to protect against floods and famines, leaving poor countries vulnerable to climate disasters even as they take steps to emit less than countries that developed earlier. Adaptation funding decreased in 2021 by 14 percent compared to 2020 and made up just a quarter of the $90 billion, according to the OECD report. Critics also say that some money tagged as climate aid has in fact funded projects that have nothing to do with climate change.
“We are very disappointed with the ambition from richer nations,” said Isatou Camara, a development planner for the finance ministry of the Gambia and a climate negotiator for a coalition of the least economically developed countries. “What we’ve been hearing from them was that they don’t have the resources to actually fulfill this commitment, but really there’s a lack of political will.” She pointed out that wealthy countries spent billions of dollars on domestic relief at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as they were lagging behind on their international commitments.
The shortcomings of the $100 billion pledge have eroded trust between the developed world and the developing world, altering the tenor of conversations about climate aid. Even with indications that the goal was likely met in 2022 — two years behind schedule — wealthy nations have a long way to go to rebuild trust with countries in the Global South.
“Showing that we have met [the $100 billion] goal is an important milestone, but that’s what it is — it’s a milestone,” said Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s climate minister, at a press conference discussing the report. “It doesn’t solve all of our problems. The conversation needs to shift. We’ve mobilized $100 billion. How do you mobilize a trillion dollars?”
Negotiators are now trying to work out a new and more ambitious funding pledge, one that would funnel much more money to developing countries and would guarantee grant support for climate adaptation projects, but mistrust is making it more difficult than ever to reach a consensus. The deadline for agreeing on a new goal is next year, and the progress of negotiations at COP28, the United Nations climate conference later this month in Dubai, will have huge implications for developing countries’ efforts to survive climate change.
Grants are still a small portion of the funding available to poorer nations, according to the OECD, which maintains the most comprehensive accounting of international climate finance. In 2021, wealthy nations provided about $20 billion in grants and nearly $50 billion in loans. The largest recipients of this funding are middle-income countries like India, Bangladesh, and Turkey, where fossil fuel consumption is rising — and where rich countries are investing in renewable energy projects. A much smaller share of money went to countries in sub-Saharan Africa or island states in the Pacific, which emit less carbon but suffer billions of dollars in damages from climate disasters each year, thanks to extreme weather, drought, and sea-level rise.
This lopsided aid landscape is due to the vagueness of the original Copenhagen pledge from 2009. The language of the treaty called for funding to be “new and additional,” but there was no clarity on what that meant, raising the risk that countries would reclassify existing aid to meet their obligations. Nor was there any mechanism for keeping track of who had donated what, or confirming whether a given contribution was “new and additional.”
Furthermore, there were few guidelines about how countries should send money or what kinds of projects they should fund. The pledge said that money should “come from a wide variety of sources” and “address the needs of developing countries,” but there was almost no detail beyond that. Many countries ended up tagging donations as climate-related when they had nothing to do with addressing global warming, and a good deal of obligated money never funded climate projects at all. A Reuters investigation earlier this year found that money tagged toward the $100 billion goal had helped open a new coal plant in Bangladesh; other funds had financed the expansion of an Italian gelato chain.
“There’s a lot of mistrust that they over-report,” said Pieter Pauw, a climate finance expert at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, a think tank focused on international development. “I’ve heard of a basketball field in the Philippines being accounted for as climate finance, and you really wonder: How?”
The larger problem for developing countries is that rich countries have sent most of their aid through interest-bearing loans, albeit often at “concessional” interest rates that are lower than they would be on the private market. Japan, for instance, has been one of the largest contributors of climate finance to the developing world, far surpassing the United States, but almost all its donations have been loans rather than grants.
“It’s because they’re not really committed,” said Iolanda Fresnillo, a finance expert at the European Network on Debt and Development, an organization that advocates for debt relief. “If you’re not really committed, then you will choose loans, because that will have a smaller impact on your fiscal indicators. It’s an asset, it’s not a loss.”
Poorer countries have no choice but to take these loans if they want to invest in crucial projects to protect against disasters, but many of these countries are already overwhelmed by debt, and they often have to constrain domestic spending in order to service their loans, cutting funding for infrastructure or public services. Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados and a leading advocate for climate-vulnerable countries, has made the loans issue a centerpiece of her advocacy at recent United Nations talks, arguing that rich countries should provide climate money through no-strings-attached grants.
Avinash Persaud, Mottley’s climate envoy, said that Barbados’ climate costs are roughly 100 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. “We can’t increase our debt by 100 percent,” he said. “We need every way of raising affordable finance.”
Developed countries’ reliance on loans has also resulted in a bias toward decarbonization projects rather than adaptation projects. When a rich country lends money to a poor country for a solar farm or a carbon sequestration project, it can expect that the project will generate financial returns, and that those returns will help the poor country repay the loan with interest. Private companies and lenders are also more likely to support projects that offer an investment return, allowing rich countries to mobilize more funds by blending public and private money. Even though an adaptation project such as a sea wall or a reservoir can help avoid economic damages from future disasters, the avoided damages don’t translate into a financial return for the borrowing country.
“If you look at the number of climate-related disasters we’ve been experiencing in our countries, it’s basically due to the inadequate resources we have to respond to the effects of climate change,” said Camara. “We’ve over and over been saying that adaptation is a key priority, and what we’ve ended up believing is that adaptation is not profitable.”
Regardless of how close countries have come to meeting their commitments from 2009, the $100 billion pledge is nearing the end of its life. Back in 2018, before wealthy countries had even come close to meeting the Copenhagen promise, international negotiators agreed to start drafting a new goal that would funnel even more money to decarbonization and disaster response.
This revised goal, which negotiators need to finalize by next year’s United Nations conference, will likely set a much higher target for annual funding. In the years since Copenhagen, scientists have gotten much better at estimating future costs of climate-related losses, and most experts now believe that annual financing needs should be measured in the trillions rather than the billions of dollars.
But just raising the target number on this “new collective quantified goal” (the United Nations’ terminology) may not be enough to ensure funding reaches those who need it. Developing countries and climate advocates are calling for a more structured commitment that would fix the vagueness of the Copenhagen pledge. This new goal would mandate that developed countries provide some portion of their funding through grants rather than loans, and would also set a minimum amount of funding for adaptation projects, which aren’t as attractive for lenders.
“There’s a push to provide more money than was provided in the past,” said Jan Kowalzig, a researcher at Oxfam who follows climate finance. “The amount depends on how you design it. We are arguing that there should be a sub-goal on adaptation, that would be about grant money only, but developed countries are very unlikely to accept that.”
Developed countries have countered that they shouldn’t be the only ones sending money. The Copenhagen pledge applied only to the wealthiest and most developed countries, most notably the United States and the European Union, and it omitted fast-developing and high-emitting countries such as China and India, as well as petrostates like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. and other wealthy contributors are now pushing to include more countries in the donor pool, arguing that they have both the means and the moral responsibility to contribute, given the emissions increases that come as countries industrialize.
These same questions are also looming over parallel talks over a separate “loss and damage” fund to compensate countries for losses incurred due to climate change, which is the other main focus of COP28. This fund, which negotiators agreed to create at last year’s climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, would offer compensation and rebuilding aid for unavoidable climate damages, rather than aid to help prepare for future disasters or ditch fossil fuels.
Here, too, developing countries are seeking strong financial guarantees from wealthy countries, and these states in turn are advocating for loans and other financial instruments rather than direct grants. The less money countries receive for adaptation funding to prevent future disasters, the more loss and damage funding they will need to recover from those disasters.
It remains to be seen how both sets of negotiations will shake out at COP28, but negotiators and outside observers say that developed countries are entering the conference with less leverage than ever. As Pauw sees it, wealthy nations’ failure to make good on their Copenhagen promise has all but ensured that they will end up paying enormous amounts of money in future years as climate impacts worsen.
“I think failure backfires on developed countries,” said Pauw, of the German Development Institute. “It gives developing countries a lot of ammunition to demand more.”
Naveena Sadasivam contributed reporting to this story.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The decade-old broken climate promise that looms over COP28 on Nov 17, 2023.
This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In the beginning, parking lots were created to curb chaos on the road. But climate change has turned that dynamic on its head.
Since the 1920s a little-known policy called parking minimums has shaped a large facet of American life. In major cities, this meant that any type of building — apartments, banks, or shopping malls — needed to reserve a certain amount of parking spaces to accommodate anyone who might visit.
But transportation makes up almost one-third of carbon emissions in the U.S. and cars represent a significant portion of those emissions. As the country attempts to aggressively cut carbon emissions, reducing dependence on fossil fuels will also mean rethinking what transportation and public space look like, especially in cities.
Earlier this month, the city of Austin, Texas, became the latest community to eliminate parking minimums and is now the largest city in the U.S. to do so.
“If we want half of all trips to be in something other than a car, then we can’t, as a city, in my opinion, mandate that every home or business have at least one parking space for each resident or customer,” said Zohaib Qadri, the Austin city council member who introduced the measure.
Reducing dependency on cars was a huge push for the initiative in Austin, said Qadri, who hopes the measure also will lead to a more sustainable city.
“Climate change is here,” said Qadri. “And we’re only going to make it worse by clinging to these very climate unfriendly and unsustainable transportation habits of the 20th century.”
The elimination of this seemingly innocuous law could pave the way for cities to build denser housing, increase public transit options, and reduce their carbon emissions, according to Donald Shoup, an engineer and professor of urban planning at UCLA.
“It isn’t just the housing crisis and climate change, it’s traffic congestion, it’s local air pollution, it’s the high price of everything — except parking,” said Shoup.
Climate change and air pollution are particularly costly outcomes, with both estimated to cost the U.S. billions of dollars every year. Parking spots, meanwhile, can run in the tens of thousands of dollars to construct, with one estimate putting that figure at almost $30,000 per spot.
“Even if climate change were not an issue, removing parking requirements is a good idea. But in addition to being a good idea locally, it will help the entire planet,” he said.
Momentum is building with cities like Anchorage, Richmond, and Raleigh, and states like California all eliminating their parking minimums within the last few years.
Paved parking lots not only take up valuable space, but also contribute to the urban heat island effect, where cities often experience higher temperatures than their rural counterparts. The asphalt and concrete used to construct parking lots often absorb and re-emit heat at higher rates than the natural environment. This happened amidst a record-breakingly hot summer which means that not only are parking lots contributing to the larger problem of climate change, but they also make the outcome worse in the short-term as well.
An important caveat is that undoing parking minimums does not mean that all parking will vanish overnight, but rather that any off-street parking built will not need to adhere to any minimum standard. These standards were not only outdated but often prevented meaningful conversation about how to increase housing density — an urgent need for most parts of the U.S., according to Tony Jordan, president of the Parking Reform Network.
“Imagine if all the parking was still built, but we just had another 10 apartments in every building in every city for the last 50 years,” said Jordan. “We’d have a housing abundance, like, that’s a lot of apartments that would have just been built that we basically prevented.”
Every time parking took precedence over other land uses, that was a deliberate choice, even when it was the result of relying on decades-old policy to avoid active decision making about public space according to Jordan.
“The cities just need to take an active role in managing what they own — the street and the curb.”
The most important effects of undoing parking minimums probably won’t be seen right away, it will take time for cities to build up their housing stock, or to increase investment in low-carbon transit options but repealing parking minimums represents an important step in building more climate-friendly cities.
“Austin is the same city that it was two weeks ago,” said Jordan. “It’s gonna take quite a while for that city to really reap the benefits of their parking mandate reforms. And so it just removes a roadblock and a barrier to other reforms.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One solution to fight climate change? Fewer parking spaces. on Nov 17, 2023.
If you live in a cold climate, the metabolic activity in your backyard compost will…
The post Strategies for Winter Composting appeared first on Earth911.
On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, that electricity is sent to the grid to power homes with clean energy.
To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later. But one thing about the Cuyama facility, which began operations this week, is less common: The batteries sending energy to the grid once powered electric vehicles.
The SEPV Cuyama facility, located about two hours northeast of Santa Barbara, is the second hybrid storage facility opened by B2U Storage Solutions. Its first facility, just outside Los Angeles, uses 1,300 retired batteries from Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf EVs to store 28 megawatt-hours of power, enough to power about 9,500 homes.
The facilities are meant to prove the feasibility of giving EV batteries a second life as stationary storage before they are recycled. Doing so could increase the sustainability of the technology’s supply chain and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building out grid-scale storage.
“This is what’s needed at massive scale,” said Freeman Hall, CEO of the Los Angeles-based large-scale storage system company.
Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.
Before they are disassembled, however, studies show that around three quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage. (Some packs may not have enough life left in them, are too damaged from a collision, or otherwise faulty.)
“We were seeing the first generation of EVs end their time on the road, and 70 percent or more of those batteries have very strong residual value,” said Hall. “That should be utilized before all those batteries are recycled, and we’re just deferring recycling by three, four, or five years.”
Extending the useful life of EV batteries mitigates the impact of manufacturing them, said Maria Chavez, energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The whole point of trying to deploy electric vehicles is to reduce emissions and reduce the negative impacts of things like manufacturing and extractive processes on our environment and our communities,” Chavez told Grist. “By extending the life of a battery, we reduce the need for further exploitation of our natural resources, we reduce the demand for raw materials, and we generally encourage a more sustainable process.”
Just as batteries have become crucial to reducing emissions from transportation, they’re also needed to fully realize the benefits of clean energy. Without stationary storage, wind and solar power can only feed the grid when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
“Being able to store it and use it when it’s most needed is a really important way to meet our energy needs,” Chavez said.
The use of utility-scale battery storage is expected to skyrocket, from 1.5 gigawatts of capacity in 2020 to 30 gigawatts by 2025. EV packs could provide a stockpile for that buildout. Hall said there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV packs sitting around in the United States that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.
“We’re going from a trickle when we started four years ago to a flood of batteries that are coming,” he said.
B2U says its technology allows batteries to be repurposed in a nearly “plug and play fashion.” They do not need to be disassembled, and units from multiple manufacturers — B2U has tested batteries from Honda, Nissan, Tesla, GM, and Ford — can be used in one system.
The packs are stored in large cabinets and managed with proprietary software, which monitors their safety and discharges and charges each battery based on its capacity. The batteries charge during the day from both the solar panels and the grid. Then B2U sells that power to utilities at night, when demand and prices are much higher.
Hall said using second-life batteries earns the same financial return as new grid-scale batteries at half the initial cost, and that for now, repurposing the packs is more lucrative for automakers than sending them straight to recyclers. Until the recycling industry grows, it’s still quite expensive to recycle them. By selling or leasing retired packs to a grid storage company, said Hall, manufacturers can squeeze out more value out of them.
That could even help drive down the cost of electric vehicles, he added. “The actual cost of leasing a battery on wheels should go down if the full value of the battery is enhanced and reused,” he said. “Everybody wins when we do reuse in a smart fashion.”
B2U expects to add storage to a third solar facility near Palmdale next year. The facilities are meant to prove the idea works, after which B2U plans to sell its hardware and software to other storage-project developers.
At the moment, though, planned deployment of the technology is limited. B2U predicts only about 6 percent of decommissioned EV batteries in the U.S. will be used for grid-scale storage by 2027.
“People are skeptical, and they should be, because it’s hard to do reuse of batteries,” said Hall. “But we’ve got a robust data set that does prove reliability, performance, and profitability. We’re at a point where we really can scale this.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms. on Nov 16, 2023.
Wondering what to plant as the days get shorter and long shadows creep across your garden? There are plenty of shade-loving plants to keep your yard vibrant during months of low light or abundant cloud cover.
Heuchera in the Hudson Valley / Jenny Lee Fowler
Coral bells, also known as alumroot, are flowering plants with exquisite, bell-shaped blossoms that come in a range of colors. These perennials can add cheerful color to your garden through their bright flowers, as well as their multicolored leaves.
Despite their delicate appearance, these hardy plants will thrive in a variety of conditions, from full sunlight to full shade, but prefer partial shade.
Native to the Russian Far East, Mexico, parts of Canada and the U.S., particularly North Carolina, coral bells are most commonly found growing in wooded areas in filtered sun or shade.
“The deer literally cozy in our grasses to sleep for the night, so anything beyond our fence needs to fend for itself. Coral bells might get a little grazed early in the season, but they always bounce back. The variety we have has elegantly curving stalks and petite sprays of deep coral — perfect for adding to bouquets. Part of the beauty of the plant is that it’s a North American native with a broad range of colors in flower and foliage including a strikingly broad range of cultivars,” Jenny Lee Fowler, an artist living in the Hudson Valley, told EcoWatch.
Coral bells should be planted late in the fall or early spring and bloom late spring to midsummer. The plants themselves last three to four years and their stems bloom continuously for up to two months.
This lovely plant also has medicinal properties; the name alumroot refers to its benefit as an astringent used to stop bleeding.
Coral bells require intermittent watering, and prefer soil that is moist, enriched with organic matter or compost and well-draining.
Impatiens flowers. Rizky Panuntun / Moment / Getty Images
Impatiens is a shade-loving plant that does well with two to four hours of dappled sunlight each day, such as morning sun and afternoon shade, or even full shade, though they will have fewer blooms in heavily shaded areas.
“A long, narrow flowerbed runs between the north side of my garage wall and a cement sidewalk. It’s quite shaded and has limited soil depth. It’s a challenging environment for gardening but impatiens have done well there. I plant them after the risk of frost has diminished, and they require very little maintenance. With just a bit of watering during dry spells and some pinching back to encourage fullness, they fill in the space nicely through early fall. I enjoy changing the color selections each year to provide variety,” Michigan novelist Cynthia Birk told EcoWatch.
Impatiens’ plentiful blossoms come in a variety of brilliant colors that stand out in any garden. They are actually perennial plants found mostly in Africa, North America and Eurasia, but are often grown as annuals.
In areas where frost is a concern, impatiens are traditionally planted in late spring after the last frost, ideally when the ground has reached at least 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Here in my area of Lower Michigan, along the dirt roads cutting through marshy and wooded lands, one will find in the summertime stands of wild Impatiens (I. capensis) displaying little hanging bells of mottled orange on slender stems,” John Hargrove, author and Hemingway researcher, told EcoWatch. “Commonly called Jewelweed, this Touch Me Not (whose seeds will literally burst from the inflated seed pods with a noticeable pop when touched) often grows near poison ivy, which is quite fortunate. The plant has a neat property that makes it effective in both removing the oils from one’s skin after contact with poison ivy, and soothing any subsequent rash. Simply crush the leaves and rub on the afflicted spot.”
Impatiens are self-seeding, though you might not see blooms on new plants until the following year.
These colorful flowers need frequent watering in well-drained soil kept moist but not soggy and enriched with organic material.
With whimsical orbs of delicate blooms resembling the puffball shape of a dandelion, primroses love partial shade, like the cool forest floor beneath a tree.
These enchanting woodland plants do not need much care other than regular watering and shade, and they prefer moist soil rich with organic matter.
Primroses thrive in overnight temperatures from 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit and lower than 80 degrees during the day.
You can expect to see their fanciful blossoms in early spring.
“Primroses will always brighten your day whether grown in the open garden, along a path, near a rock (they are a perfect rock garden plant) or in a container. From species to hybrids, primroses can add a wide range of colors and textures to your overall garden scheme. Ranging in size from tiny in stature to mounding, there are double-flowering forms that create stunning little pompoms; large-flowering forms in which the foliage is completely obscured; multi-colored forms that have prominent eyes and sometimes rings; and even green flowering forms that will give visitors a pause. All but the rarest of species are easy to grow, loving shady spots to sunny locations, and will reward one throughout the year,” Hargrove said.
Late blooming nasturtium in Seattle. Sarah Mitchell
If you’re looking for a cheerful flower with many different colors and patterns that grows well in the shade and is also edible, nasturtiums might be the ideal choice for your garden.
Seattle and London are perfect examples of the cloudy, temperate climates that some nasturtiums prefer.
“Nasturtiums are very easy to grow here and will even reseed themselves for a little surprise in the next year. Their best features are their lily-pad-like leaves and vibrant flowers, which are edible and make any plate look exotic in the summer. My favorite variety have deep, purple flowers,” Sarah Mitchell, a lawyer and gardener from Seattle told EcoWatch.
Nasturtiums can add a splash of color to your garden, a peppery flavor to a salad, a lovely garnish to a cheese plate or be used as a graceful cake decoration. They also attract aphids — especially those with yellow flowers — which works well to keep the bugs away from other plants, like veggies and roses.
These bright annuals can be grown in a bushy, climbing or cascading presentation, but when it comes to regular care, they do not require much at all. In fact, the more you leave them alone, the better.
There are more than 50 types of nasturtiums, and they grow best in soil that is well-drained but not too rich or fertilized — the poorer the soil, the larger the blooms they’ll produce.
Foxgloves attract pollinators to gardens. Dirk Siemer / 500px / Getty Images
“One morning she saw, on the opposite side,
A Foxglove displaying his colours of pride:
She gazed on his form that in stateliness grew,
And envied his height and his brilliant hew
She mark’d how the flow’rets all gave way before him,
While they press’d round her dwelling with far less decorum”
— From “The Harebell and the Foxglove” by William Ball, 1828
Foxgloves are tall, tubular wildflowers native to Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. They come in a variety of bright and pastel shades and most often flower in late spring or early summer.
Fall or spring is the best time of year to plant foxgloves. Since they grow in glades or woodlands in the wild, they prefer light cover or flecks of shade. One thing to note is that they are prone to powdery mildew if exposed to an overabundance of shade. They are used to rich, loamy soil made with lots of organic matter like leaves. This soil drains well and foxgloves will need to be watered regularly at first, then mostly only during dry periods.
These elegant herbaceous woodland plants can be either biennials or perennials. They are superb at attracting wildlife to gardens, as bumblebees and hummingbirds with their long tongues love the flowers’ abundant nectar.
Foxgloves can add color and grace to any garden, whether they are planted in shady courtyards or in borders on the side of a structure.
Though lovely, foxgloves are toxic and should not be ingested.
The post 5 Vibrant Plants That Thrive in Shade and Cloudy Climates appeared first on EcoWatch.
Plastic trash produced by the company PepsiCo has become a “persistent and dangerous form of plastic pollution” for residents of the Buffalo River watershed in upstate New York, according to a new lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The suit, brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, is one of the first legal challenges from a state against a major plastic producer. It draws on a 2022 investigation from James’ office in which PepsiCo-branded plastic packaging was found to be by far the most significant contributor to plastic waste clogging the Buffalo River and its tributaries. Out of nearly 2,000 pieces of plastic trash collected at 13 sites along the waterways, PepsiCo products — which include brands like Aquafina, Cheetos, Gatorade, and Lay’s — accounted for more than 17 percent of those with identifiable branding.
All that plastic litter is breaking down into tiny fragments — microplastics — that are winding up in Buffalo’s water supply and the fish that people eat. Some of the chemicals contained in microplastics are carcinogenic, and researchers have raised concerns that the particles could cause reproductive dysfunction and other maladies.
“PepsiCo’s irresponsible packaging and marketing endanger Buffalo’s water supply, environment, and public health,” James said in a statement.
The New York lawsuit includes a “public nuisance” claim and requests that the state’s Supreme Court require PepsiCo to reduce the amount of plastic packaging entering the Buffalo River and remediate pollution that has already occurred. It also invokes consumer protection law: Although PepsiCo has “long been aware” of the environmental and human health risks posed by single-use plastic products, the AG’s office says PepsiCo has obscured these risks in communications to the public — in part by promoting plastics recycling and the promise of a so-called “circular economy,” in which plastic products can be endlessly reprocessed rather than eventually turned into waste.
One PepsiCo communication cited in the lawsuit says the company’s plastic recycling strategy will “keep the material in the circular economy.”
Most plastics — including all of PepsiCo’s snack food wrappers — cannot be recycled, and even the company’s plastic soda bottles can only be turned into a new bottles a few times before they have to be junked. Nationally, only 5 percent of plastics are ever turned into new products.
Meanwhile, PepsiCo has repeatedly missed or failed to make progress toward its own targets for plastic reduction and the use of recycled content. Most recently, the company reported an 11 percent increase in virgin plastic use between 2020 and 2022, despite a commitment to reduce virgin plastic by 20 percent by 2030. Between 2018 and 2022, it also reported a decrease in the fraction of its plastic packaging that was reusable, recyclable, or compostable.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, PepsiCo said it is “serious about plastic reduction and effective recycling.”
”This is a complex issue and requires involvement from a variety of stakeholders, including businesses, municipalities, waste-reduction providers, community leaders, and consumers,” a spokesperson said via email.
According to a national waste audit coordinated by the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic Pollution, PepsiCo has been among the top three companies creating the most pieces of plastic litter every year since 2018. Only the Coca-Cola Company has consistently produced more plastic litter.
Environmental nonprofits have repeatedly sued PepsiCo and other companies over their use of plastic and claims about recyclability, but these suits have been less common at the state level. Last year, Connecticut’s attorney general filed a truth-in-advertising lawsuit against Reynolds Consumer Products, arguing that the company labeled its Hefty trash bags as recyclable “despite full knowledge that their bags were incompatible with recycling facilities in Connecticut.” Minnesota’s attorney general filed a similar lawsuit earlier this year, targeting both the Hefty manufacturer and Walmart.
Those suits, however, did not invoke public nuisance law — something that makes the PepsiCo case “new and very exciting,” according to Bethany Davis Noll, executive director of the State Energy and Environment Impact Center at the NYU School of Law. She could think of only one other ongoing public nuisance lawsuit related to plastic pollution, filed in 2020 by the nonprofit Earth Island Institute against companies including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. Public nuisance has played a more prominent role in recent lawsuits filed by attorneys general against manufacturers of PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” which have tainted drinking water supplies worldwide.
The New York lawsuit seeks to require PepsiCo to attach a warning label to any single-use plastic products sold in the Buffalo region, conveying plastics’ risks to public health and the environment. It also seeks civil penalties, restitution, and disgorgement of any profits it made through sales in the Buffalo region that were found to have been illegal under New York state’s consumer protection laws.
Rachel Karasik, a senior policy associate at the Duke University Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability, said a successful case could spur PepsiCo to invest in reuse systems throughout the Buffalo area. In the absence of a New York state-wide extended producer responsibility law for plastic packaging — a policy that makes plastic producers financially responsible for the waste they produce — Karasik also said litigation could yield financing for plastic cleanup and collection activities.
Noll hoped the New York attorney general’s case would inspire more legal challenges elsewhere. Plastic pollution is “prevalent all around the country,” she told Grist. “We’ve got to figure out a way to get companies to stop lying about how this stuff is recyclable.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York calls PepsiCo’s plastic pollution a ‘public nuisance’ in first-of-its-kind lawsuit on Nov 16, 2023.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James sued PepsiCo on Wednesday, claiming the corporation had endangered the environment and misled the public regarding its plans to get rid of single-use plastic packaging.
The attorney general’s office found that the food and beverage giant’s products had contributed to a great deal of the plastic waste in and around the Buffalo River, James said, as The New York Times reported.
“All New Yorkers have a basic right to clean water, yet PepsiCo’s irresponsible packaging and marketing endanger Buffalo’s water supply, environment, and public health,” James said in a statement, according to a press release from the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
The lawsuit is one of the first to be filed by a U.S. state against a major plastics producer.
The office said that, according to a waste survey conducted last year, of the 1,916 plastic trash pieces that were collected from the Buffalo River that could be easily attributed to an identifiable brand, more than 17 percent were produced by the company, reported Axios.
About 78 percent of waste collected in the Buffalo River watershed from 2013 to 2022 by volunteers from the Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper was plastic, the press release said.
In addition to its cola, PepsiCo makes Lay’s potato chips, Doritos, Cracker Jack, Quaker, Ocean Spray, Ruffles, Gatorade, Mountain Dew and Lipton.
James added that the plastics can break down and enter the water supply, adding to health issues, Reuters reported.
The corporation has set a goal to make all its products completely “recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or reusable” by 2025.
A spokesperson for the company said it “is serious about plastic reduction and effective recycling, and has been transparent in our journey to reduce use of plastic and accelerate new packaging innovation. PepsiCo has been working in New York to address the needs of communities, including advocating for New York bottle bill improvements and extended producer responsibility bills,” according to The New York Times.
James is seeking damages and demanding that the company reduce the amount of plastic packaging entering the Buffalo River, as well as a remedy for contamination caused by PepsiCo products in the Buffalo region. The attorney general is also requesting that the corporation stop distributing or selling products in the region made of single-use plastics that do not have “adequate” warning labels. “No company is too big to ensure that their products do not damage our environment and public health,” James said in the statement. “No one should have to worry about plastics in their drinking water, plastic garbage littering their scenic riverfront, or plastic pollution harming wildlife. I will never hesitate to take on major corporations that put the health and safety of everyday New Yorkers and our planet at risk.”
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A new recycling plant in Motala, Sweden has the capacity to recycle more plastic packaging per year than any other recycling plant in the world, The Associated Press reported.
According to Svensk Plaståtervinning (Swedish Plastic Recycling), the plant, called Site Zero, can recycle up to 200,000 metric tons of plastic packaging annually.
The facility spans 60,000 square meters and can currently sort four different types of plastic. However, Swedish Plastic Recycling said that Site Zero will ultimately be able to sort 12 different plastic types, so it can take all plastic waste from households in Sweden.
The facility can sort polypropylene (PP), high-density polyethylene (HDPE), low-density polyethylene (LDPE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) trays and bottles, PP film, expanded polystyrene (EPS), polystyrene (PS), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and two grades of polyolefin mix, as well as metal and non-plastic waste.
“This investment creates the prerequisites needed for making Sweden a world leader in plastic recycling,” Mattias Philipsson, CEO of Swedish Plastic Recycling, said on the Site Zero webpage. “Being able to do it together with our producer customers and owners, who consist of large parts of the Swedish business community, is very inspiring.”
The facility can sort about 1,000 packages per second using Near Infrared (NIR) sensors, artificial intelligence and laser and camera technologies. According to the company, the facility is also powered with renewable energy.
According to Philipsson, the former recycling plant where Site Zero is now located was only able to sort and send about 47% of plastics on for recycling, while the rest was sent for incineration, The Associated Press reported. Now, Site Zero will be able to send up to 95% of plastics for recycling.
From the sorting site, the plastics may be mechanically or chemically recycled. However, some researchers and environmentalists have warned that types of advanced recycling, like chemical recycling, can be environmentally harmful. Chemical recycling can require a lot of energy and emit greenhouse gases, Inside Climate News Reported.
Reducing and reusing are still the top goals to minimize waste and related pollution and emissions. But for the plastic that is still being used, a more efficient recycling facility like Site Zero could help recycle these materials for use in other products, creating less reliance on virgin plastics. A recent study published in Environmental Technology & Innovation found that recycling plastic reduces carbon emissions by about 42% compared to producing virgin plastic, although this can vary based on factors like type of plastic and recycling method.
“With Site Zero, we have set a new path for plastic recycling and the rest of Europe,” Philipsson said in a press release. “The world needs to follow suit, to reduce emissions from combustion and the need for new fossil plastics. It is no longer justifiable to burn as much plastic as we do or melt it down into low-quality products that cannot be recycled again.”
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Prior to 2020, seaweed, known as macroalgae, was thought to be around 800 million years old, but a green seaweed fossil discovery in Northern China dates back over a billion years, with some scientists believing that it was the ancestor of not just modern day seaweeds, but also land plants such as trees, bushes, grasses and others.
Green seaweed was the first class of seaweed, and over the course of evolution red and brown seaweed emerged. Thousands of different species now belong to each of these categories.
Seaweed was used for thousands of years to enrich infertile and oceanfront soil in agriculture with the first written record dating back to the Romans. It was also used as medicine and food, and much like today, a dietary staple in Asian countries like Japan, China and Korea.
Seaweed was also used as traditional medicine by many coastal dwellers and First Nations peoples.
In some Indigenous cultures, like those in the Pacific Northwest, coastal Salish myths spoke of the interdependence and spiritual kinship between the people and the sea, as well as traditional pathways and marine livelihoods in coastal communities, where it was utilized in fishing, hunting, food preparation and other ways.
During the 16th century in Europe, kelp, which is a brown seaweed in shallow salt waters, started to become harvested and burned for its sodium compounds (soda), iodine and potassium compounds (potash), which were used to make soaps, glass, fertilizers, linens and eventually explosives.
Prior to this, potash was traditionally made by using wood ash and water, until wood supplies dwindled and the Scots began to use more kelp, which later was used throughout Europe to meet the demand of the above industries, which devastated traditional farming in coastal communities.
Germany became one of the highest producers of the world’s potash, after it discovered vast amounts of potash salt that could be mined, but stopped exporting during the outbreak of World War I. The U.S., which was one of its largest buyers, used it for fertilizer on crops like cotton, corn, potatoes, beets and tobacco.
This led the U.S. to build up its own potash industry by burning kelp like its European counterparts, becoming a major industry along the Pacific in California, while creating gunpowder to ship to the UK during the war.
Once the war was over, the revival of German imports ended California’s industry. However, the seaweed industry has continued to grow in the U.S. and all over the world.
With its versatility and numerous health benefits, seaweed is found on plates globally, in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, is used as a thickener and emulsifier foods and other products, and is now being looked at as a solution for our most urgent environmental challenges.
Researchers say seaweed is responsible for around 70% of the world’s oxygen, and the basis for the ocean food chain, providing critical habitat for fish, birds and marine mammals to find food away from other predators.
Seaweed also has the capacity to reduce pollution. With its ability to absorb toxins, it can be used to treat wastewater as well as reduce harmful nutrient pollution in waterways from agriculture and sewage runoff. Research also shows that seaweed can reverse ocean acidification that is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
One of the larger draws of seaweed these days is also its ability to sequester carbon.
According to a BBC report, it is estimated that it could sequester 200 million tonnes globally. This kind of sequestration is known as blue carbon, which is carbon captured by ocean and coastal ecosystems.
Seaweed grown as a crop can be sunk into deep water rather than harvested, which offers a strategy for climate change mitigation.
Blue carbon markets have been popping up globally, with seaweed (kelp in particular) becoming potentially eligible for carbon credits — a sometimes controversial scheme where people can earn credit for sequestering carbon and sell it to companies that want to counteract their own emissions.
Oceans 2050, an initiative spearheaded by Alexandra Cousteau and Fritz Neumeyer, is leading the global effort to research seaweed carbon sequestration to be able to provide the quantifiable evidence the carbon market needs so that seaweed farmers can monetize their efforts.
A seaweed farm in Indonesia. Konstantin Trubavin / Cavan Images
While some have started kelp farming efforts to implement ecosystem restoration, the farming of seaweed has been around for hundreds of years.
Farmed seaweed is used for a variety of industrial products, food, feed and biofuel. It can be farmed on both on-shore and land-based farms.
In on-shore farms, farmers grow seaweed using a process known as vertical farming, which means most seaweeds grow on long lines suspended around 4-8 feet below the surface throughout the winter. Farming offshore not only provides a source of marine permaculture that grows seaweed for products, but also food security, while working to fix the environment.
According to Scientific American, a single acre of ocean can produce 25 tons of greens and 250,000 shellfish in five months, which suggests that a network of small underwater farms could potentially feed the planet.
California Sea Grant said that the appeal of nearshore environments keeps labor costs low, but the competition for suitable sites from the commercial fishing, shipping and tourism industries has increased interest in off-shore production, including at wind farms. However conditions can be challenging and concerning regarding ecosystem impacts.
On land-based seaweed aquaculture farms, seaweed is grown in tanks or ponds, where environmental conditions can be controlled. This also provides an opportunity to grow species that cannot be grown on lines.
To farm seaweed it’s important that it follows regulations not to damage the environment.
In 2021, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce and National Marine Fisheries Service put out a state by state guide of seaweed aquaculture leasing and permitting requirements.
In general, for onshore production, farmers need to register with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and if a structure is involved on state land, they need to obtain a lease from the State Lands Commission.
For open-water seaweed production, a state water bottom lease needs to be obtained, along with a complete environmental review for the area and permits for farming.
In the past 20 years, seaweed farming and production has grown exponentially. According to FAO, the global seaweed output (both wild and aquaculture) has increased from 118,000 tons to 359,200 tons from 2000-2019. In 2019, 97% of global aquaculture seaweed came from artificial farming with production led by Asia and Indonesia.
In North America, 95% of seaweed was obtained from natural sources.
In 2021, Scotland charity Sustainable Inshore Fisheries created a guide to encourage coastal communities to consider both potential positive and negative impacts of seaweed aquaculture sites in local areas and ecosystems.
Though seemingly abundant, seaweed has been listed as endangered in recent years. This has been the result of coastal development that destroys habitats, pollution, heatwaves, storms, overfishing and global warming.
In 2011, Western Australia lost 43% of its kelps in an extreme heatwave, while Northern California also saw a 93% decline from 2008-2014 according to aerial surveys by the CA Department of Fish and Wildlife.
On Long Island, the Shinneock Nation own and operate the first native-owned and operated kelp farm on the East Coast. Called the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, they are reviving traditional practices in an ecosystem their ancestors stewarded for thousands of years before European colonizers and commercial fishing arrived.
The kelp farmers are getting technical assistance from Greenwave, an ocean farming incubator, who also offers 10 cents a pound for the kelp grown.
Coastal Indigenous tribes are leading restoration efforts on both coasts, alongside those in Hawaii.
The Limu Hui, a community group in Hawaii, is working to restore 60 plus limu (seaweed) species that have become less common due to environmental changes from climate and colonization, with the goal of restoring the ecosystem and traditional cultural uses to be able to pass down ancestral knowledge to the next generation.
There are also a number of Tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska who, in addition to connecting to their longtime-stewarded ecosystems, are working on restoration projects to create food sources, sellable products and stable jobs.
Seaweed is pretty ubiquitous in a number of products, as well as a source of food, and already functions as an environmental solution in a number of areas. Here are some of its uses:
Methane, which is one of the leading contributors to climate change, accounts for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. One third of those emissions comes from cows, specifically cow burps and flatulence.
As cows digest food, the microbes in their stomachs produce the methane, but researchers have found that feeding little bits of seaweed to cattle could cut their methane emissions by more than 80%.
Subsequently, scientists at Australian company FutureFeed worked to determine which kind of species of seaweed would be most effective, landing on Asparagopsis taxiformis, a type of red algae.
Since then several companies have popped up offering feed additives, working on how to scale production to meet global demands.
The most recent is Rumin8, an Australian start-up backed by Bill Gates. The company will not farm for it, but rather reproduce it in a lab for distribution to both developed and developing countries.
The more established Blue Ocean Barns, which has labs in both Hawaii and San Diego, produces their product Brominata, which they now distribute with partners such as ice cream giants Ben and Jerry’s, and other dairy and beef farms, with sales approved by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The company, which received $20 million in funding from Valor Siren Ventures last fall, also certifies carbon credits for corporate partners.
Another Hawaii-based startup, Symbrosia, has recently partnered with algae supplement producer Cyanotech on their product SeaGraze, and has already been running pilot programs with the regenerative ranching collective Carman Ranch and others.
In coastal areas, for hundreds if not thousands of years, sheep, cattle and horses have eaten seaweed, particularly in Europe. Today the availability of seaweed for animals has been increased with the production of seaweed meal, with Norway being one of the earliest producers.
Besides using seaweed as a means to curb methane in livestock, its dense nutrition also makes it an excellent feed contributing to protein and energy requirements, as well as serving as a prebiotic that could enhance health.
However, monitoring of the minerals in seaweed is essential, as they absorb heavy metals and if not monitored could become toxic to the animal, as with humans.
Using kelp in the biofuel industry isn’t new. Throughout the 1970s to 1990s, both New York and California were part of the U.S. Marine Biomass program. It began as a response to the energy crisis caused by an oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The program was eventually discontinued because it could not compete economically with fossil fuel production. It was also criticized by the public and media.
Now utilizing seaweed as biofuel is gaining popularity again amongst researchers as a viable and renewable resource for fuel due to pollution, inflated oil prices and climate change, particularly since it can produce better yields with less resources.
Several startups globally are researching and developing alternatives to help solve the plastic crisis.
In the Philippines, innovators developed a biodegradable plastic wrap alternative extracting carrageenan from seaweeds and pectin from mango peels.
In London, the startup Notpla is designing a seaweed based replacement for other single-use plastics. Their products include sachets for condiments, water and even alcohol; a film wrap for products in your pantry or bathroom, like coffee or toilet paper; and food takeout boxes that replace plastic-based coating with seaweed lining to make them fully biodegradable.
Seaweed is also being used to make sustainable fabric for clothing and eco-friendly shoes to abate usage of plastic-based acrylic, nylon, spandex and polyester, which often ends up in landfills.
Seaweed has long been used in coastal communities as fertilizer and soil conditioner.
Seaweed is beneficial to soil and plants, helping to provide nutrients, and stimulating growth. In general, seaweeds contain 10 times the mineral levels of land-based plants and are particularly rich in iodine and calcium.
There are currently a number of soil fertilizers on the market, but if you live in coastal areas, sustainably harvesting washed up seaweed can be directly applied on garden beds (too salty to plant), or it can be composted or added to compost to mix with the soil later.
The species of seaweed typically used are sargassum, ascophyllum, ecklonia and fucus.
Seaweed can be a great bioremediation tool for wastewater due to its ability to absorb toxins. Wastewater from industrial operations, and conventional agriculture operations where livestock waste, synthetic pesticides and other causes pollute waterways, causing eutrophication, which is a process when the environment becomes so enriched with nutrients, it increases the amount of plant and algae growth to waters. Some of that growth is harmful algal blooms.
Harmful algal blooms occur typically result from the artificial nitrogen and phosphorus in synthetic fertilizer from farms that wash out in the rain and enter waterways. This is harmful to both humans and animals, and those who drink or swim in it can have rashes, fever, liver and kidney damage.
There are other harmful effects also from industrial and commercial wastewater pollution that contain excess nutrients, which can also cause eutrophication, and heavy metals, which also have detrimental impacts on the environment and human health.
Seaweed’s ability to absorb heavy metal toxins from these became apparent when seaweed used as food for humans was first being analyzed. The heavy metal content varied according to geographic source and proximity to industrial waste sites. From that research came the idea that they could be used as indicators for heavy metal pollution.
While there are more expensive and less sustainable ways to treat the water, researchers found that seaweed is a great sustainable and cost-effective source to absorb excess nutrients and heavy metal pollution.
In China, they found large-scale seaweed farms removed approximately 75 and and 9.5 megatons of nitrogen and phosphorus that prevented eutrophication from agricultural, industrial and sewage wastewater. The World Bank estimated that a global seaweed harvest of 500 million tons by 2050 could utilize around 25 million tons of nutrient absorption generated from feces and fertilizers.
As mentioned earlier, hundreds of years ago in Scotland, seaweed, particularly kelp, was burned down into an ash that was a practice utilized by many to use as a product in soaps, among other things.
Now, unbeknownst to most of us, seaweed is part of many of our products. The popular extract from red seaweed called carrageenan is a binding agent used in foods as well as toothpaste. It also makes it into other products as a thickener and emulsifier in shampoos, conditioners, lotions and moisturizers.
Alginate from brown seaweeds is also used as a thickening and stabilizing agent in many of those products as well, and is said to be a moisturizing agent.
Edible seaweed is a staple in many Asian diets and according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, China is the largest producer of edible seaweed, followed by Korea and Japan, but commercial harvesting occurs in another 35 countries with growing popularity in the United States.
Seaweed is dense with nutrients, containing vitamins such as A, D, E, C and B, and minerals including calcium, potassium, magnesium and iron. It’s also packed with the minerals sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, iodine, potassium, iron and zinc. It also contains a high amount of protein.
Some studies say that it may help blood sugar control, support healthy thyroid function and promote heart health.
Common types of edible seaweed are nori, which is typically used to wrap sushi, kombu, sea Moss, hijiki, wakame, dulse and chlorella.
The extracts carrageenan and agar from seaweed are also used in many foods that aren’t as healthy as a binding agent. Agar is used in icings, glazes, processed cheeses, jelly and jam. Carrageenan is used in ice cream, sauces, processed meats and soy milk.
Medicinal usage of seaweed has been around for thousands of years, with traditional seaweed-based treatments and remedies passed down orally among coastal dwellers from generation to generation. Some were collected in books, with the earliest archeological evidence dated back to 14,000 BCE in modern day Chile.
Traditional Chinese medicine used hot water extracts of certain seaweeds in the treatment of cancer. Additionally, the Japanese and Chinese cultures have used seaweeds to treat goiter and other glandular problems since 300 BC.
Seaweed was also used in other areas of the world as treatment for wounds, burns and rashes, for abdominal issues, edema, goiter, cold and flu, intestinal problems, inflammation and a host of other issues. Some employed tinctures, infusions, pils, wines, poultices, ash and charcoal.
It was used in the popular 1800s cough syrup Bonnington’s Irish Moss.
Cultures still use this traditional medicine today, but it has not reached mainstream pharmaceuticals in modern medicine. Research is being done and clinical trials are underway, however, some of which involve potential treatment for Altzheimers, and other research is being done for antimicrobial and anticancer treatments.
Some seaweed compounds, such as alginate, however, are already used regularly in the medicinal field as binding agents, carrier material of medical tablets or wound dressings.
According to a study, the rapid expansion of the seaweed industry, combined with rising seawater temperatures and coastal eutrophication, has led to an increase in infectious diseases and pest outbreaks. Despite biosecurity policies to keep the spread of this happening in other global food production, there isn’t anything effective in place for seaweed aquaculture.
Currently, there is also no federal guidance on the food safety risks of seaweed in its whole form, leaving states unsure how to proceed with their own laws and regulations, which according to the National Sea Grant Law Center, is impeding the growth of the industry.
This year, however, the Coastal Sea Grant Act of 2023 was introduced — which is a bill directing NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to produce a joint study evaluating the benefits and impacts of coastal seaweed farming — and includes the Indigenous Seaweed Farming Fund to reduce cost barriers for Indigenous communities wanting to participate in coastal seaweed farming.
The hope is to also develop regulations based on the study to maximize potential benefits of coastal seaweed farming, and avoid adverse impacts, calling for collaboration with the Interagency Working Group on Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Tribes, states, local governments and other federal agencies on best practices.
Seaweed has an incredible number of uses. It’s an integral puzzle piece to the survival of our planet. It serves as a potential mitigator for climate change issues. It’s excellent for our health and used in a number of our everyday products. It’s also a catalyst for enabling the cultural and environmental restoration of ecosystems.
While there are many benefits seaweed provides health-wise, agriculturally, culturally and environmentally, there still needs to be more conclusive research policies for seaweed production, particularly on environmental impacts of expanded industry.
In the meantime, the growing interest in the industry because of its health reasons and its ability to help thwart climate challenges is helping it expand globally, and fast.
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