Diamonds are diamonds wherever they come from, right? Depends on whether you’re asking a jeweler,…
The post Guest Opinion: The Environmental Impact of Lab-Grown Diamonds appeared first on Earth911.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Earlier this month, Laurie Stanek shoveled hay to a group of young black-and-white Holstein cows, just a few among the roughly 200 cattle on her family dairy farm. Located in northern Michigan’s Antrim County, she has worked there for almost 50 years now.
The farm day starts early.
“We’re out here at 5 o’clock every morning to get started feeding the babies,” she said.
But there are some additional chores for farmers in Michigan, now that avian influenza, or bird flu, has made the jump to cattle.
New state requirements include limiting the number of visitors and increasing disinfection practices like cleaning boots and vehicles. Michigan also has prohibited poultry or lactating cows from being shown at events like fairs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has required that lactating cows moving across state lines receive a negative test result on bird flu.
“We are conscious that the threat is there, and we wouldn’t let just anybody come in,” Stanek said, referring to the state requirement to limit visitors.
With outbreaks of bird flu in dairy cattle across the country, health officials are emphasizing biosecurity — that is, efforts to prevent the introduction and spread of disease.
Researchers are still working to understand how climate change is affecting the spread of the bird flu. But, as Grist has previously reported, H5N1 has spread outside its typical seasons as migratory patterns have changed. And research has shown that generally, climate change could join a host of other factors in making the transmission of viruses between species more likely — something called “viral spillover.”
“We are in a place where the threat of emerging pathogens is much greater than ever before. So therefore, the need for biosecurity is even more significant than it has ever been before,” said Suresh Kuchipudi, a professor and chair of the infectious diseases and microbiology department at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health.
Some, like Kuchipudi, say scaling up biosecurity operations can help the agricultural sector become more resilient to climate change. But it’s just one part of the complicated process of responding to the spread of viruses like the bird flu.
This strain of avian influenza is called H5N1, and it’s highly pathogenic, meaning it’s deadly for poultry. First detected in the 1990s, it has surged over the last several years, spreading to birds and mammals across the world.
The spread to cattle is new.
“I’m a virologist by training, and my other virologist buddies and I all have to admit: None of us saw this coming,” said Kim Dodd, the director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Michigan State University. Animals like foxes can contract the flu when they eat an infected carcass. But cattle don’t eat meat.
“We didn’t expect to find [highly pathogenic] avian influenza in dairy cattle, and to find that it amplifies so well, and that we have so much virus in the milk,” Dodd said. “And so that’s really a big part of trying to understand, you know, what do we do about that to be able to help control the outbreak.”
The first confirmed case in cattle was reported in Texas earlier this year, and 11 more states have confirmed cases of the bird flu in dairy herds.
Michigan has reported the most cases in the country. As of Wednesday, the state had confirmed 25 instances of the flu in herds. It also has 2 of the 3 confirmed cases of the disease in people — the other was a dairy worker in Texas.
In May, state officials declared the flu an “extraordinary emergency,” calling it a threat to animal health, human health, trade and the economy.
Officials and researchers have said Michigan’s high case count is an example of robust testing in response to the outbreak. Overall, the response to the bird flu outbreak in cattle has been somewhat rocky. States have pushed back against federal efforts to address the virus, and public health experts have raised concerns about the lack of testing and warned that the true reach is likely greater that official counts.
Those involved in Michigan’s response have said part of its response is collaboration with farmers. “That takes two sides,” said Dodd. “It takes the people who are looking and the people who are testing, but it also requires that the people who own the animals are opening their doors and allowing testing to occur.”
H5N1 causes a reduction in cows’ milk production, among other symptoms. It can devastate the poultry industry; since it was detected in commercial flocks in the United States in 2022, it has led to the deaths of close to 100 million farmed birds.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have maintained that the danger to the public is relatively low. But dairy workers are now more at risk of exposure to the bird flu as they work with cows; the virus appears to be spreading largely through milk.
“We want to make sure that we’re limiting the further spread of the virus, so that we’re continuing to protect human health, and we don’t have so much virus in the environment that could potentially mutate and affect humans in a different way,” said Tim Boring, the director of the state Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
One of the ways the state is doing that is by urging farms to follow biosecurity measures. These are pretty low tech — like wearing protective gear and disinfecting equipment. How effective they are comes down to compliance.
“I’m sure they’re serious. I’m sure they’re not fooling around. It’s their livelihood, their investments,” said Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt, a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Montreal. But “if they’re not sharing data, and they’re not doing good surveillance to figure out who’s where and what and all that, we already have a big problem.”
Climate change coincides with the spread of certain diseases, as animals interact with one another in new settings. While biosecurity may play a role in prevention or response, it likely won’t stop the next pandemic, Vaillancourt said. He argues that we should actually be looking at disease from a regional perspective.
“What can we do to minimize the spread between sites?” he said. “That requires data sharing.”
That’s where industry and institutions often fall short. Farms that have outbreaks can face stigma and lose money, and farm workers that test positive can deal with health and economic issues. Worker advocacy groups have also voiced concerns that testing isn’t reaching those on the front lines.
Some public health experts say the surge of bird flu in cattle is an opportunity to hone that response and protect animal and human life in the process.
“The fact is, [governments] need to learn how to get this right when the stakes are lower, because there are less forgiving bird flu viruses than this one,” said Amesh Adalja, a scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
The agricultural industry will have to be part of any response to infectious diseases as the climate changes. Humans often interact with animals in agricultural settings. Preventing and responding to viruses also requires establishing trust with farmers.
“This is going to be part of how you think about building resilience, is that you kind of have this integrated approach,” Adalja said.
That approach is known as One Health, which many involved in public health have pointed to as a framework that acknowledges the connection between people, animals and the environment and seeks to address issues like disease in a holistic way.
Wildlife surveillance systems and vaccine programs can help track and control viruses like the bird flu.
And the dairy industry can learn something from those working with pigs, Vaillancourt said. An effort called the Morrison Swine Health Monitoring Project has involved farmers and the industry in keeping track of disease in pigs.
The big picture, he said, is that everyone involved in livestock needs to think about stopping the spread of disease. Say a farmer needs to move some cows.
“How do we move them?” he said. “Which roads are we going to use to minimize contaminating a site on our way. How do we clean and disinfect the vehicles when we go from one site to another site?”
A few efforts have been pushed forward as the virus has spread. The federal government announced that it would spend $824 million in emergency funding on its response, and the USDA just launched a voluntary pilot program to test cow milk in bulk.
And agricultural officials in Michigan say more safety measures on farms could become a bigger part of the state’s approach to climate change.
“Improving biosecurity in new ways that we hadn’t previously considered, I think, will increasingly be a component of robust climate resiliency actions,” said Boring, the director of the state agriculture department. “So we’re seeing a little bit of that in real time here with our response to H5N1 here in the state.”
And back in Antrim County, Laurie Stanek said dealing with animal sickness is just part of running a farm; they’re paying attention to the new rules and doing what they’ve always done.
“A lot of it’s just good herdsmanship — just common sense,” she said. “You keep your animals healthy so they in turn give you a healthy product.”
That, she said, is what their livelihood depends on.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Michigan: Climate change, bird flu, and dairy cows — and why ‘none of us saw this coming’ on Jun 13, 2024.
A reservoir is many things: a source of drinking water, a playground for swimmers, a refuge for migrating birds. But if you ask solar-power enthusiasts, a reservoir is also not realizing its full potential. That open water could be covered with buoyant panels, a burgeoning technology known as floating photovoltaics, aka “floatovoltaics.” They could simultaneously gather energy from the sun and shade the water, reducing evaporation — an especially welcome bonus where droughts are getting worse.
Now, scientists have crunched the numbers and found that if humans deployed floatovoltaics in a fraction of lakes and reservoirs around the world — covering just 10 percent of the surface area of each — the systems could collectively generate four times the amount of power the United Kingdom uses in a year. The effectiveness of so-called FPVs would vary from country to country, but their research found that some could theoretically supply all their electricity this way, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Papua New Guinea.
“The countries around the world that we saw gain the most from these FPVs were these low-latitude, tropical countries that did not have a high energy demand in the first place,” said Iestyn Woolway, an Earth system scientist at Bangor University and lead author of a new paper describing the findings in the journal Nature Water. “It meant that if only a small percentage of their lakes — this 10 percent — was covered by FPVs, it could be enough to fuel the energy demand of the entire country.”
For developing countries, floatovoltaics could be especially powerful as a means of generating clean electricity. Instead of building out more planet-warming infrastructure running on fossil fuels, like gas-fired power plants, fledgling economies could run panels on land and water, in addition to other renewables like wind and hydropower. With solar power comes autonomy: Utilities don’t have to rely on shipments of fossil fuels, but can tap into the abundant power of the sun.
Floatovoltaic solar panels — which have been proliferating globally, from California to France to Taiwan — are the same ones found on a rooftop. “It’s the same electrical system, same panels, same inverters,” said Chris Bartle, director of sales and marketing at Ciel and Terre USA, which is deploying floatovoltaic systems. “We’re just providing a structure that floats to mount that electrical system.” The solar rafts are anchored either to the bottom of the water body or to the shore, or both, to keep them from wandering.
In many ways, solar panels and bodies of water can benefit one another. Photovoltaics get less efficient the hotter they get, so having them floating on a lake or reservoir helps cool them off. “Because of the cooling effect, we see increased efficiency of the systems,” said Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new research. Returning the favor, the panels provide shading, reducing evaporation. If floatovoltaics are spread across a reservoir, that could mean more water would be available for drinking.
If a reservoir is equipped with a dam for hydroelectric generation, the floatovoltaics could hook into that existing transmission infrastructure. (Countries like Kenya, for instance, are building out more of this hydroelectric infrastructure already.) That could save local governments money because they wouldn’t need to string new transmission lines from the floatovoltaics to the nearest city. In the event of a drought, when water levels drop too low to generate hydropower, the panels could still operate as backup power.
To do their new modeling, Woolway and his colleagues began with over a million lakes and reservoirs around the world big enough and deep enough for floatovoltaics. Then they whittled those down based on critical qualities. For one, the body of water couldn’t dry up, beaching the panels, or freeze over for more than six months a year, entombing the panels in ice and damaging them. The lake couldn’t be protected by law, either, like as a natural refuge. And the site had to be near a human population that could use the generated power.
A remote lake, by contrast, would require long transmission lines to connect a faraway city to the floatovoltaics. This doesn’t necessarily rule out the technology for more remote communities of people living near an otherwise suitable lake. In fact, floatovoltaics could be particularly potent there as a way to provide clean energy. These cases just weren’t included in the scope of this modeling.
Regardless, all those characteristics considered, the team ended up with 68,000 feasible locations in 163 countries. They found that on average, countries could meet 16 percent of their energy demand with floatovoltaics, but some places could generate a lot more. In Bolivia, for instance, floatovoltaics could provide up to 87 percent of national electricity demand, and in Tonga, they could meet 92 percent. The potential is much lower in the United States, however, meeting just 4 percent of energy demand — even though the country has a plethora of large lakes and reservoirs, overall energy usage is extremely high. In less sunny climes, like northern Europe, the effectiveness of floatovoltaics drops, but Finland could still satisfy 17 percent of its electricity demand with floating panels.
“The regions or the countries that we saw had the highest potential had these two critical variables, in that they were close to the equator, or were at high elevations, so they received high amounts of incoming solar radiation,” Woolway said. “And secondly, they had large water bodies.”
Covering 10 percent of a 100-square-mile lake, for instance, would end up with a lot more solar panels than covering the same percentage of a 10-square-mile lake. “We considered 10 percent to be a reasonable surface area coverage without having a devastating impact on the ecology and the biodiversity,” Woolway said. “If you were to cover the surface 90 percent with solar panels, there would be no light going into the water itself.”
This is where the new science of floatovoltaics gets tricky, as there’s still little data on the potential environmental and social downsides of these floating systems. Scientists are investigating, for example, whether the floats might leach harmful chemicals or microplastics into the water.
And keep in mind that these ecosystems are solar-powered, too: Light fuels the growth of aquatic vegetation, which feeds all kinds of other organisms. If a floatovoltaic system cuts off too much of that light, it might reduce the food supply, and hinder plants’ ability to produce oxygen. “You’re changing light penetration, and that’s the most fundamental physical variable for an aquatic ecosystem,” said Rafael Almeida, a freshwater ecosystem scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who studies floatovoltaics but wasn’t involved in the new study. “If you don’t have enough light, and you’re reducing oxygen concentrations in that system, and that may cascade through the food web, potentially impacting fish.” At the same time, early research suggests that the panels can counter the growth of harmful algal blooms that make water dangerous for people to drink.
Scientists are still trying to figure out what amount of coverage can still produce enough power to justify the monetary cost of deploying floatovoltaics, while not incurring ecological costs. Each body of water is its own unique universe of chemical and biological interactions, so the same coverage on two different lakes might have dramatically different effects. “Would 10 percent be enough to cascade into system-wide changes?” asks Almeida. “These are things that we really don’t know.”
Researchers also need more data on how effective the panels are at reducing evaporation, and therefore how much water a given system might actually save. “What we are yet to fully understand is that so many of the existing floating solar systems that have tried to collect data on this have been smaller,” Gadzanku said. “So it is more: How do potential evaporation savings scale as you build larger systems?”
Humans rely on bodies of water in many ways other than for drinking. Subsistence fishers rely on them for food. And owners of lakefront properties might bristle if they think floating solar panels would cut their property values.
Still, Almeida says, this new research identifies where floatovoltaics might work, and how much energy they might provide given local conditions. “I think that now what we need,” said Almeida, “is understanding — out of these suitable sites — which ones are really the low-hanging fruits.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Coming soon to a lake near you: Floating solar panels on Jun 13, 2024.
Many power tools use batteries to run instead of corded electricity or the muscle of…
The post Recycling Mystery: Rechargeable Tool Batteries appeared first on Earth911.
Birds, fish and caribou are all known for their long migrations, but did you know insects migrate too?
According to a new study, each year 17.1 million insects move through a 98.4-foot gap in the Pass of Bujaruelo between two Pyrenees peaks on the border between Spain and France.
For four years, a team of scientists from the University of Exeter visited the pass to monitor the extensive number of species of day-flying insects on their way south.
“In autumn 1950 David and Elizabeth Lack chanced upon a huge migration of insects and birds flying through the Pyrenean Pass of Bujaruelo, from France into Spain, later describing the spectacle as combining both grandeur and novelty. The intervening years have seen many changes to land use and climate, posing the question as to the current status of this migratory phenomenon,” the authors wrote in the study. “Numbers at this single site hint at the likely billions of insects crossing the entire Pyrenean mountain range each year, and we highlight the importance of this route for seasonal insect migrants.”
The insects migrating along this well-established route start their journeys in the United Kingdom and other parts of northern Europe.
“[Elizabeth and David Lack] witnessed remarkable numbers of marmalade hoverflies migrating through the mountains, the first recorded instance of fly migration in Europe. In 2018, we went to the same pass to see if this migration still occurred, and to record the numbers, species, weather conditions and ecological roles and impacts of the migrants,” said Will Hawkes, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation, in a press release from the University of Exeter.
17 MILLION insects migrate through a 30m Pyrenean mountain pass every autumn!
They fly through the mountains on their remarkable journeys from northern Europe (including the UK) into Spain and beyond for the winter!
Our new paper is out right now: https://t.co/yQOEzoWxGC
— Dr Will Leo Hawkes (@WillLeoHawkes) June 12, 2024
The researchers did counts of the small insects using a video camera and used visual counts for butterflies. To identify migrating species, they used a flight intercept trap.
“What we found was truly remarkable,” Hawkes noted. “Not only were vast numbers of marmalade hoverflies still migrating through the pass, but far more besides. These insects would have begun their journeys further north in Europe and continued south into Spain and perhaps beyond for the winter. There were some days when the number of flies was well over 3,000 individuals per metre, per minute.”
The study, “The most remarkable migrants — systematic analysis of the Western European insect flyway at a Pyrenean mountain pass,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“To see so many insects all moving purposefully in the same direction at the same time is truly one of the great wonders of nature,” said Dr. Karl Wotton, team leader and co-author of the study, in the press release.
Insect numbers peaked during sunny, dry and warm conditions when wind speed was low and there was a headwind. This kept the insects flying low over the pass, making them easier to count.
“The combination of high-altitude mountains and wind patterns render what is normally an invisible high-altitude migration into this incredibly rare spectacle observable at ground level,” Wotton explained.
Most of the total number of insects — 90 percent — were flies, though a range of species was observed. While dragonflies and butterflies are well-known migratory species, they accounted for less than two percent. Many of the migrating insects were known garden dwellers like house flies, tiny grass flies and the cabbage white butterfly.
“It was magical. I would sweep my net through seemingly empty air and it would be full of the tiniest of flies, all journeying on this unbelievably huge migration,” Hawkes observed.
Almost 90 percent of the migrators were pollinators who carry genetic material long distances by migrating between plant populations, which improves plant health. They also transport nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients and assist with decomposition.
Many of the insects were “pest controllers,” such as pied and marmalade hoverflies who feed on larval aphids.
These important migrating insects are believed to be declining due to habitat loss and climate change.
“By spreading the knowledge of these remarkable migrants, we can spread interest and determination to protect their habitats,” Hawkes said. “Insects are resilient and can bounce back quickly. Together, we can protect these most remarkable migrants of all.”
The post ‘One of the Great Wonders of Nature’: Migration of 17.1 Million Insects Through Pyrenees Mountain Pass Witnessed by Scientists appeared first on EcoWatch.
An international team of scientists say efforts to protect the ozone layer have been a “huge global success,” with damaging atmospheric gases declining more quickly than expected.
According to the new study, the total amount of chlorine — which depletes the ozone — in all hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) peaked in 2021, five years earlier than the most recent predictions.
“This has been a huge global success. We’re seeing that things are going in the right direction,” said Dr. Luke Western, lead author of the study and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry, as The Guardian reported.
The reduction in HCFCs is largely due to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which introduced controls on the usage and production of ozone-depleting substances. HCFCs were once common in the manufacturing of hundreds of products, from refrigerators and packaging to aerosol sprays and foams.
Lowering the amount of HCFCs — which are also greenhouse gases — should help lessen global heating, a press release from University of Bristol said.
Developed to replace chlorofluorocarbons — banned globally since 2010 — production and usage of HCFCs is still in the process of being phased out.
“The results are very encouraging. They underscore the great importance of establishing and sticking to international protocols,” Western said in the press release. “Without the Montreal Protocol, this success would not have been possible, so it’s a resounding endorsement of multilateral commitments to combat stratospheric ozone depletion, with additional benefits in tackling human-induced climate change.”
HCFC emissions fell less than one percent between 2021 and 2023, but are still moving in the right direction.
“Their production is currently being phased out globally, with a completion date slated for 2040. In turn these HCFCs are being replaced by non-ozone depleting hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and other compounds. By enforcing strict controls and promoting the adoption of ozone-friendly alternatives, the protocol has successfully curbed the release and levels of HCFCs into the atmosphere,” Western said.
Highly precise measurements of these substances are gathered at atmospheric observatories worldwide by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) and the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment.
“We use highly sensitive measurement techniques and thorough protocols to ensure the reliability of these observations,” said Dr. Martin Vollmer, co-author of the study and an atmospheric scientist with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, in the press release.
The study, “A decrease in radiative forcing and equivalent effective chlorine from hydrochlorofluorocarbons,” was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“This study highlights the critical need to be vigilant and proactive in our environmental monitoring, ensuring other controlled ozone depleting and greenhouse gases follow a similar trend which will help to protect the planet for future generations,” said Dr. Isaac Vimont, study co-author and NOAA research scientist, in the press release.
The post Efforts to Protect Ozone Layer a ‘Huge Global Success,’ Scientists Say appeared first on EcoWatch.
In a new report, the nonprofit As You Sow has found that of 147 companies with recyclability targets, only 22 are on track to meet their goals. In total, the report reviewed 225 companies and their progress toward plastic-related goals, with about half of companies receiving an “F” score.
The 2024 Plastic Promises Scorecard has revealed a gap between the plastic waste reduction goals that companies set and the actual actions they are making toward meeting those goals. The report evaluated companies on a total score based on their ambitions and their actions toward goals related to six pillars: recyclability, reduction, recycled content, recovery, reusable and extended producer responsibility. Ambitions counted toward 30% of the total score, while the actual actions companies were taking made up 70% of the final score.
“Plastic Promises Scorecard uses a first-of-its-kind scoring system to evaluate not just what companies say they will do to act on the plastics crisis, but what they have actually accomplished,” Venky Kini, data lead and report partner, said in a press release. “We are pleased to present this tool for companies to evaluate their progress against their peers and identify opportunities for new action and ambition.”
As Grist reported, even though many companies have goals to reduce their plastics, they are often using more plastic. According to the report, about 100 companies have pledges to use less virgin plastic, but rather than reducing their reliance on plastic, they have plans to swap virgin plastics for recycled plastics.
The findings showed that most of the companies in the report had targets to incorporate recycled content, but the same companies weren’t investing in recycling infrastructure to collect old packaging and recycle it. Only nine of the 225 companies had even set goals to create zero-waste packaging that could be reused or recycled indefinitely, rather than becoming waste.
According to a 2020 report titled Breaking the Plastic Wave, which was cited in the Plastic Promises Scorecard, existing plastic waste reduction pledges by companies and governments are far short of what is needed to prevent plastic pollution from building up in the environment. Breaking the Plastic Wave revealed that if companies and governments met their existing pledges, it would reduce the flow of plastic reaching the oceans by only 7% by 2040. Already, ocean plastic pollution is expected to triple by 2040 without interventions, reaching 29 million metric tons per year.
The latest Plastic Promises Scorecard did show some hope, though. It found that more companies were supportive of producer responsibility legislation, and As You Sow shared in a press release that shareholders for multiple companies, including Hershey and Amazon, were supportive of more sustainable packaging initiatives.
“Companies can use the recommendations and scoring methodology in the Plastic Promises Scorecard to prepare for a future where plastic packaging pollution is no longer an acceptable part of doing business,” said Kelly McBee, lead author of the report and circular economy manager at As You Sow. “This report is designed to be actionable and transparent, giving companies the tools and solutions they need to create a circular economy for plastic.”
The post Only 22 Companies Out of 147 Are on Track to Meet Their Plastic Waste Reduction Targets, Report Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.
Hey there, fam. Today’s spotlight story is a collaboration with The Green Fix, a Europe-focused climate newsletter managed by Cass Hebron. Cass and I have been following each other’s work for a while now, and we teamed up to bring you this story about the world’s first master’s program in degrowth.
In 2018, one of Spain’s top-ranked universities, which trains its graduates for careers in everything from neuroscience and biomedicine to government and economics, launched a first-of-its-kind master’s program in a more nascent and explicitly nontraditional field: a degree in degrowth.
Degrowth is a movement that calls for intentionally scaling down overdeveloped economies, like those in the U.S. and Europe, focusing instead on citizens’ well-being, ecological sustainability, and providing for basic needs without extracting every last resource. The idea has been gaining momentum, particularly in Europe where it originated, and its proponents argue it offers the best path to a lifestyle that is compatible with addressing climate change — one that respects the planet’s limits and avoids unnecessary emissions by simply producing and consuming less.
The master’s program and a separate online master’s in degrowth that was started in 2021 have now seen hundreds of graduates. But what does it mean to train people for a career in disrupting the whole idea of careers? And what happens when graduates of a program designed to reimagine the system have to find their place within that system?
Big questions, but ever since we at Looking Forward and The Green Fix first learned about this unique degree program, we’ve been wanting to find out what it’s really like to study degrowth — and what happens afterward.
A meetup of degrowth master’s students, from both the in-person and online programs, in June 2022 in Can Masdeu, an occupied social center in Barcelona. Jana Kenkel
The university is called the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, or Autonomous University of Barcelona, which is a way of saying a university not controlled by the government. And the degree is technically in political ecology, degrowth, and environmental justice. In other words, studying sustainable alternatives to the modern economic system.
One of the masterminds behind the program is Giorgos Kallis, a prominent researcher and advocate in the field of degrowth. Kallis, an academic with a warm and approachable air, describes his research as “un-disciplinary,” in the sense that it has spanned many topics, from droughts and water policies to ecological economics. It was his work on water management that led him to question the paradigm of continuous and necessary growth.
He became a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2010 and, along with colleagues at the Research & Degrowth association, launched a summer school program in degrowth. “There were many people who would come for the summer school and they would say, ‘We wish there was also a full master’s,’” Kallis said. At the same time, there were plenty of researchers in the field who were eager to teach.
Students at the master’s program in Barcelona take theoretical classes in degrowth, environmental justice, and alternative economics and governance structures, and also receive practical training in skills like group facilitation, how to run a social justice campaign, and how to set up a cooperative. All backgrounds are welcomed, but the program tends to attract radically minded students — “at least in terms of the need for transformation in order to confront climate change,” Kallis said. Around two-thirds of the students who attend the in-person program are from Europe. The online program, which is solely focused on theory, tends to reach a more diverse mix.
Kallis and his colleagues also designed the in-person program specifically to prepare students for the job market. It offers career development with three main paths in mind: policy and advocacy work; work in the social and cooperative economy; and research.
“I mean, we don’t mind someone working in the private sector and bringing these ideas wherever they want,” he said. But it tends not to attract the kind of person who’s interested in climbing the corporate ladder, so to speak.
A class on group facilitation techniques in October 2022, with students from the in-person master’s program. Jana Kenkel
France-based graduate Adélaide Cadioux had been jumping between jobs for years before enrolling in the Barcelona program. “I was feeling very dissatisfied with the way that companies were working. My values were seemingly constantly misaligning with people’s needs for profit.” She found the program by pure chance while searching on the university website, and described it as a moment of revelation. “I was like, ‘I need to quit my job and do that master’s.’”
There, she said, “I found people who understand what it feels like to constantly feel like you don’t fit in and your values are not represented in whatever job you’re going for.” Many of the students there shared her desire to find an alternative to traditional capitalist ways of working. “There’s also a form of radical acceptance,” she said. “It’s normal that you feel like this. Let’s work together on something else.”
Valerie Costa, a recent graduate from the U.S., was feeling burned out after working in the nonprofit and social good sectors for around two decades. “I wasn’t even really actively wanting to be a grad student,” she said, “but I was like, ‘Oh, wow. I could take a year and really think about everything I’ve been working on, but in a deeper way.’”
Recent Belgian graduate Emilie de Bassompierre had already encountered the concept of degrowth in their previous studies and was looking for a way to put it into practice. “I had teachers who were very keen on studying critiques of capitalism,” they said. “My studies helped me gain an understanding of not only how that system came to be from a historical perspective, but also, if we want alternatives, what are the elements of the system that we have to think of dismantling?”
Post-graduation, de Bassompierre is facing down the reality of balancing their values with their need to pay the rent — and how to make use of having the privilege of being able to prioritize their values for at least a while; a privilege many other students share. “It’s already been a few years that I’m aware that whatever I want to do, it’s not going to be something that brings me a lot of money,” de Bassompierre said. Following graduation, they are pursuing an internship in climate justice at a European nongovernmental organization. After that, they are considering a future in either advocacy or academia. But the most important thing, they said, is that they can pursue a life that makes them happy — and they don’t anticipate working full time forever.
“Before, I was always looking at what I ‘should’ do or what was the ethical, moral thing to do. But that can lead you to burning out. I think it’s possible to deconstruct the idea that we have to define ourselves through our work,” de Bassompierre said. “I want to have free time for activism and independent projects.”
Cadioux and Costa are also weighing how degrowth fits into their future plans. Cadioux is still searching for a job. “If something comes along the lines of what I want … I [would] find ways to amp up my activism or give back to the community, where it just feels like a sort of equal relationship between what you take from capitalism and what you give back to your community,” she said.
For Costa, incorporating degrowth principles and advocacy into her work has been challenging in other ways. After graduating, she returned to the U.S., where the concept is still fairly novel. “I’m not gonna walk down the street with a degrowth flag,” she said. She added that, from a policy perspective, the U.S. lacks the kind of social safety net that is a prerequisite to effective and equitable degrowth. “I’m not going to campaign for austerity,” she said. “What I do want is more livable communities for people. I want people to be more connected with each other. I want better services and supports in place, better housing.”
After completing the program, her activism has remained focused on resistance, with an element of community-building as well. She co-founded a Seattle-based network called Troublemakers that weaves those two things together. “For me, the degrowth program really illuminated the absolute critical importance of community and connection,” she said.
While he believes that this specialized training in degrowth and political ecology is valuable, and was previously missing from the academic landscape, Giorgos Kallis also recognizes that studying degrowth may be something of a hard sell when job hunting. “Would the ministry contract someone who has studied how to degrow the economy, when no one wants to degrow it?” he said.
Still, at least two alumni of the master’s program have gone on to be assistants to members of the European Parliament, Kallis noted. Others have organized an annual festival that brings together LGBTQ+ rights with elements of degrowth. And others are working as activists, teachers, nonprofit leaders, and more.
Kallis believes that there is value in studying the principles of degrowth whether or not students go on to find their lifelong path in bringing it to fruition. “I want to think that increasingly there will be demand for out-of-the-box thinking,” he said. “And I also want to think that, degrowth or not degrowth, our students are getting good training in fundamental theories, models, ecological economics, political ecology. So even if they don’t work on degrowth per se — but they work on some other framework or transition or climate mitigation — they have the skills to be critical and good thinkers.”
For Angela Huston, who, like many other graduates of the online program, is mid-career and less willing than some of the in-person students to spend several years just pondering how to change the system, this was exactly the point.
Huston had been working in public services and international development in Italy for 10 years before doing the virtual master’s. She said she valued how the program forced her to question the cultural expectations to make money and be financially comfortable. “I was super-radical hardcore in my university days,” she said. “And then, I think over time, I started to conform more with the world. And that’s part of the reason I’ve gone back to degrowth. We need more of this radical thinking that’s not trying to align with and appease current systems.”
Given the urgency of the climate crisis and how challenging it is to change the current economic system in the timeframe needed, Huston said she is open to working with for-profit companies, where she can influence their climate-transition strategies from inside and help mitigate their climate impacts.
Applications for the seventh cohort of the Barcelona program are now open. The program was restructured this year, based on feedback from students and faculty, to include things like a stronger focus on activism skills and more intersectional frameworks, such as feminism and decolonization.
The coordinators of both the online and in-person degrees are currently focused on making them more accessible to people from different backgrounds, especially those from outside Europe and the U.S. They are also working to more actively steward the network of alumni, and are looking toward an alumni conference next year.
And as for the graduates who are still trying to figure out what their degrowth studies mean for their path out in the current working world? “I don’t think that it’s because we studied degrowth that now we’re lost,” de Bassompierre said. “It’s more the opposite: figuring out how to work toward the world we want to see.”
— Cass Hebron and Claire Elise Thompson
While Valerie Costa noted that she wouldn’t necessarily march down a street in the U.S. with a degrowth sign, that sight is much more commonplace in Europe. Here’s a photo from a Fridays for Future protest just last month in Munich ahead of the European elections.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What can you do with a degree in degrowth? on Jun 12, 2024.
It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.
The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too — until he started doing something about it. “These?” he says, holding up a soda can. “I recycle these.” As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, “This could change your life.”
Recycling, once considered the domain of people with “long hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,” as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth — an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.
What no one anticipated was just how emotionally attached people would become to recycling as the solution to America’s ugly trash problem. When the chasing arrows’ promise of rebirth was broken, they could get angry. One cold winter day in 1991, people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, chased after garbage trucks, yelling for them to stop, after the drivers had nabbed their sorted glass, cans, and cardboard from the curb. Strained by an influx of holiday-related trash, the city had instructed workers to forgo recycling and just throw everything away.
Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent — found on plastic bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren’t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol’s use on many plastic products was “deceptive.”
Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don’t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a “little bit of homework” to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that’s asking a lot.
The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste. “Contamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,” the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies; some don’t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access to any recycling services.
The difficulty of recycling plastic can make the chasing-arrows symbol near meaningless, with environmental groups calling plastic recycling a “false solution.” Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets shredded or melted down so that it can be used again. Much of the rest flows into landfills or gets incinerated, breaking down into tiny particles that can travel for thousands of miles and lodge themselves in your lungs. Plastics threaten “near-permanent contamination of the natural environment,” according to one study, and pose a global health crisis, with plastic chemicals linked to preterm births, heart attacks, and cancer.
So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows — regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don’t support the recycling symbol’s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. “The magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,” he said, has led “policymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.”
In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the population — showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.
The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. “The environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word ‘recycle’ doesn’t even appear in most dictionaries,” the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as “the only ecologically sensible long-term solution” for a country “knee-deep in garbage.”
It wasn’t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master’s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher’s Möbius strip, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to “spread awareness among concerned citizens.”
The Möbius loop he created soon passed from his mind. “I just didn’t really think of the symbol that much,” he recalls. “It wasn’t used very much in the first couple of years.” One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program in 1972. “It just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,” he said.
Refashioning old materials into new things is a longstanding American tradition. Paul Revere, folk hero of the American Revolution, collected scrap metal and turned it into horseshoes. In the 19th century, used rags were turned into paper, and families stitched together scraps of fabric to create quilts. The desperation of the Great Depression taught people to make underwear out of cotton flour sacks, and the propaganda posters of World War II positioned recycling as a patriotic duty: “Prepare your tin cans for war.”
“It was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,” said Jackie Nuñez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. “We had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.”
One of the first lessons of “throwaway society” came in the 1920s, when White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to sell its burgers in single-use bags, advertising them as clean and convenient. “Buy ’em by the sack,” the slogan went. In 1935, the big breweries that survived the Prohibition era started shipping beer in lighter, cheaper-to-transport steel cans instead of returnable glass bottles. Coca-Cola and other soda companies eventually followed suit.
All those paper sacks and cans soon littered the sides of American roadways, and people started calling on the companies that created the waste to clean it up. Corporations responded by creating the first anti-litter organization, Keep America Beautiful, founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Keep America Beautiful’s advertisements in the 1960s looked like public service announcements, but they subtly shifted the blame for all the garbage to individuals. Some featured “Susan Spotless,” a girl in a white dress who would wag her finger at anyone who soiled public spaces with their litter.
The pressure on American businesses didn’t go away, though. On the Sunday after Earth Day in April 1970, some 1,500 protesters showed up at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta to dump hundreds of cans and glass bottles at its entrance. Two years later, Oregon passed the country’s first “bottle bill” requiring a 5-cent deposit on bottles and cans sold in the state, incentivizing people to return them, while Congress was considering banning single-use beverage containers altogether. Manufacturers successfully lobbied against a federal ban, arguing that jobs would be lost, as the historian Bartow J. Elmore recounts in the book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. But corporations still wanted to relieve the public pressure on them and outsource the costs of dealing with the waste they were creating. Luckily for them, recycling was in vogue.
In New York City, the war on waste was spearheaded by the Environmental Action Coalition, an organization raising funds for its “Trash Is Cash” community recycling program, with the long-term goal of getting recyclables picked up by city workers outside homes. Curbside recycling seemed to serve everyone’s interest: Environmentalists wanted to waste less, and companies could use it as an opportunity to shift the cost of dealing with waste onto city governments. Businessmen who volunteered with the Environmental Action Coalition solicited millions in donations from their colleagues in the 1970s, writing that recycling had “substantial promise” to fend off any legislation to ban or tax single-use containers.
The campaign was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from more meaningful solutions like bottle bills, yet environmental groups embraced it, according to Recycling Reconsidered, a 2012 book by Samantha MacBride, who worked in New York City’s sanitation department for two decades. The New York City Council started its mandatory curbside pickup program in the late 1980s, several years after the first one began in Woodbury, New Jersey, requiring residents to set out their paper, metal, glass, and some types of plastic in bins at the curb. The idea picked up in cities across the country, with the number of curbside programs growing from 1,000 to 5,000 between 1988 and 1992, spreading the chasing arrows along with them.
“It was in the late ’80s and early ’90s that this thing just becomes everywhere,” said Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada. America was running out of places to put its trash, a dilemma captured by the story of a nomadic garbage barge in 1987. In March of that year, a barge teeming with 6 million pounds of trash left Long Island, New York, looking to unload its freight where the landfills weren’t already full. States from North Carolina to Louisiana turned it away, and the barge spent months traveling around the Atlantic coast — all the way to Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas — looking for a place to dispose of the garbage.
In October, the barge made its way back to Brooklyn, where a court ordered that its contents be incinerated — but not before Greenpeace activists hung a giant banner on the boat: “NEXT TIME … TRY RECYCLING.” Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace, told PBS Frontline in 2020 that she wonders whether that banner was a mistake. “I think we were overly optimistic about the potential of recycling,” she said, “and perpetuating that narrative led us astray.”
There’s an iconic scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, gets cornered at his college graduation party by one of his parents’ friends. “I just want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics,” the older man says. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” One generation’s earnest advice for a successful career clashed with a new, skeptical attitude toward plastic, which had already become a byword for “fake.”
By the early 1970s, scientists had learned that whales, turtles, and other marine life were getting tangled up in plastic debris, a problem that was killing 40,000 seals a year. They knew, too, that small plastic fragments were making their way into the ocean, and that plastic residues had entered people’s bloodstreams, presenting what an official from President Richard Nixon’s Council of Environmental Quality deemed a significant health threat, “potentially our next bad one.” The more people learned, the more plastic’s reputation transformed from all-purpose, indestructible wonder into something that maybe shouldn’t be trusted in your new microwave. Between 1988 and 1989, the percentage of Americans who believed plastic was damaging the environment rose from 56 to 72 percent. Larry Thomas, the president of the Society of Plastics Industry, warned in an internal memo that companies were starting to lose business, writing, “We are approaching a point of no return.”
Beverage companies and the oil industry hoped to advertise their way out of the PR problem, laying out plans to spend $50 million a year to tout the polymer’s virtues with slogans like “plastics make it possible.” They also turned to recycling. Lewis Freeman, the former vice president of government affairs at the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry group, told Grist that he has a vivid memory of a colleague coming into his office, saying, “We’ve got to do something to help the recyclers.”
Freeman tasked the Plastic Bottle Institute — made up of oil giants like BP and Exxon, chemical companies, and can manufacturers — with figuring out how to clarify to recycling sorters what kind of plastic was what. In 1988, they came up with the plastic resin code, the numbering system from 1 to 7 that’s still in place.
Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET (1), is used to make soft drink bottles; high-density polyethylene (2) is used for milk jugs; polyvinyl chloride (3) is used for PVC pipes in plumbing, and so on all through 7, the catch-all category for acrylic, polycarbonate, fiberglass, and other plastics. The Plastic Bottle Institute surrounded these numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the public the impression that they could throw all kinds of plastics into recycling bins, whether there was infrastructure to process them or not. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the confusion it would cause “will have a severe impact on the already marginal economic feasibility of recycling plastics as well as on recycling programs as a whole.”
Once the symbol was operational, Freeman said, “then everybody started putting it on everything.” Companies worked to make it official: Starting in 1989, the Plastic Bottle Institute lobbied for state laws mandating that the code numbers appear on plastic products. Their express purpose was to fend off anti-plastic legislation, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity. The laws eventually passed in 39 states.
By the mid-1990s, the campaign to “educate” the public about plastic recycling had succeeded: Americans had a more favorable opinion of plastic, and efforts to ban or restrict production had died down. But recycling rates — the share of materials that actually get reprocessed — had barely improved. Instead, the United States started exporting plastic waste to China, where turning old plastic into new materials helped meet growing demand from manufacturers. Polling conducted for the American Plastics Council in 1997 showed that people who worked in waste management were losing hope that plastics could be recycled, while the public, journalists, and government officials believed they could be recycled at unrealistically high rates.
The problem was, fulfilling what companies called the “the urgent need to recycle” wasn’t as easy as the advertisements made it look. For decades, industry insiders expressed serious doubts that recycling plastic would ever be profitable, with one calling the economic case “virtually hopeless” in 1969. There are thousands of plastic products, and they all need to be sorted and put through different processes to be turned into something new. The way packaging is molded — blown, extruded, or stamped — means that even the same types of plastic can have their own melting points. A PET bottle can’t be recycled with the clear PET packaging that encases berries. A clear PET bottle can’t be recycled with a green one.
The plastics that do happen to get sorted and processed can only be “downcycled,” since melting them degrades their quality. Recycled plastic, it turns out, is more toxic than virgin plastic, liable to leach dangerous chemicals, so it can’t safely be turned into food-grade packaging. It’s also more expensive to produce. The result of this morass is that there is virtually no market for recycled plastics beyond those marked with 1s and 2s; the rest are incinerated or sent to landfills. Only 9 percent of the plastics ever produced have gone on to be recycled.
As plastic waste piled up and public frustration mounted, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition — backed by corporate giants including Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil — launched a bigger, more specific recycling initiative in 2008 called “How2Recycle.” It came with new labels that appeared to provide clarity about which elements of a product could be recycled, distinguishing between plastic wrap and coated trays, sometimes qualifying the recycling logo with “store drop-off” labels for plastic bags and film.
But environmental advocates say that the How2Recycle labels, used by more than a third of the companies that package consumer goods, may be even more misleading than the resin code. For example, plastic yogurt containers made of polypropylene, number 5s, are considered “widely recyclable” under the system, yet only 3 percent of all the polypropylene containers produced actually get recycled.
The plastic resin code with the chasing arrows certainly confused people — 68 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019 said they thought anything labeled with the code could be recycled. But the How2Recycle labels “put the lies on steroids,” said Jan Dell, the founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup. It’s not just a tiny triangular indent on the bottom of a container anymore, but a large, high-contrast recycling logo that “stares you in the face.”
Given the dismal state of plastic recycling, it might seem like the best thing to do is throw the chasing arrows in the garbage. But not all recycling is a failure. “Metals are the true success story,” said Carl Zimring, a waste historian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. As much as three-quarters of all the aluminum that’s ever been produced is still in use, he said. Paper is also relatively easy to process, with more than two-thirds making its way into new products in the U.S. Even for a recycling standby like glass, though, less than a third gets broken down into fragments for new jars and bottles.
The recycling logo still gives anything it touches — whether feasible to recycle or not — a green aura. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe recycling is one of the most effective ways they can fight climate change, when experts say it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a credit to the iconic triangle, which has had 50 years to entrench itself in our culture. “It’s easy to bash on the image, or bash on corporations, without seeing this as something that is very powerful,” said Dunaway, the environmental historian. So is there a way to give the recycling symbol meaning again?
When recycling started taking off in the early 1990s, there was no definitive, agreed-upon definition of what it meant. “Anything is recyclable, at least theoretically,” one lawyer pointed out in a legal journal in 1991. The effort to impose some sort of order came from California, often the national laboratory for environmental protection. The state passed the country’s first restrictions on green claims in 1990, prohibiting advertisers from using terms like “ozone-friendly” and “recyclable” on items that didn’t meet its standards (though that stipulation didn’t survive a challenge in court).
Wider efforts to restrict the symbol, however, lacked strength and enforcement. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission told advertisers they could call a product “recyclable” even if only 1 percent of their product was recycled. Not much else happened on that front until 2013, when the group that administers the plastic resin code, ASTM International, announced that it was replacing the chasing arrows with a solid triangle to reduce public confusion. It didn’t require manufacturers to rework their labels, though.
Today, that might finally be changing. When China banned the import of most plastics in 2018, it revealed problems that had long remained hidden. The United States had been shipping 70 percent of its plastic waste to China — 1.2 billion pounds in 2017 alone. States set about finding ways to fix the recycling system, with some focusing on the confusion generated by the symbol itself. In 2021, California — the world’s fifth-largest economy — passed a “truth in labeling” law prohibiting the use of the chasing arrows on items that are rarely recycled. To pass the test, 60 percent of Californians need to have access to a processing center that sorts a given material; on top of that, 60 percent of processors have to have access to a facility that will remanufacture the material into something else.
Though the bill faced opposition from companies right until it passed, the idea resonated with legislators, said Nick Lapis, the director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste. “It was pretty easy to understand that putting the chasing arrows symbol on a product that is not ever going to get recycled is not fair to consumers. Like, it just made so much intuitive sense that I think it kind of went beyond the lobbyist politics of Sacramento.”
Across the country, public officials in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state are considering similar legislation. This spring, Maine passed a law to incentivize companies to use accurate recycling labels on their packaging. New rules around the recycling logo are also brewing at the national level. Last April, Jennie Romer, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention, called for the FTC to put an end to the “deceptive” use of the iconic chasing arrows on plastics in its upcoming revisions to the Green Guides for environmental marketing claims. “There’s a big opportunity for the Federal Trade Commission to make those updates to really set a high bar for what can be marketed as recyclable,” Romer told Grist. “Because that symbol, or marketing something as recyclable, is very valuable.”
Once California’s law goes into effect next year, state laws will clash with each other, since many states still require the resin numbers on plastic packaging. “The question on everyone’s mind is, who’s going to win out?” said Allaway, the Oregon official.
Talk of truth-in-labeling legislation has coincided with another trend — states trying to turn the costs for dealing with waste back on the manufacturers that produced it. Laws requiring “extended producer responsibility,” or EPR, for packaging have already been approved in Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. It’s already led to problems in California, since the EPR bill refers to the state’s truth-in-labeling law to determine which materials can be recycled, creating incentives for everything to be labeled as recyclable, Dell said.
Even if the Federal Trade Commission updates the Green Guides to prohibit the deceptive use of the recycling symbol, it doesn’t change the fact that the guides are just suggestions. They don’t carry the weight of law. “The FTC itself has never enforced a false recyclable label, ever, ever, on plastics, not once,” Dell said. One of Dell’s favorite metaphors: “It’s the wild, wild West of product claims and labeling, with no sheriff in town.”
So Dell has appointed herself de facto sheriff, suing companies over their false claims. In 2021, her organization reached a settlement with TerraCycle, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and six other companies that agreed to change labels on their products. Dell recently filed a shareholder proposal with Kraft Heinz in an attempt to force it to remove recyclability claims from marshmallow bags and mac-and-cheese bowls destined for the landfill.
Another promising legal push is coming from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has been investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for what he called “an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” Despite mounting awareness of plastic’s threat to public health, oil and chemical companies around the world make 400 million metric tons of the polymer every year, and production is on track to triple by 2060. It’s the oil industry’s backup business plan in the expectation that wealthy countries will shift away from gasoline in an effort to tackle climate change, since petroleum is the basic building block of plastics. Exxon Mobil, the world’s third-largest oil producer, ranks as the top plastic polymer producer.
Stricter enforcement around the use of the chasing arrows could lead to more accurate labels, less public confusion, and better outcomes for recycling centers. But it’s worth asking whether more recycling should even be the goal, rather than solutions that are much better for the environment, like reducing, reusing, refilling, and repairing. As Anderson, the symbol’s inventor, says, “I don’t think it’s really fair to blame a graphic symbol for all of our lack of initiative in trying to do better.”
Correction: This story originally mischaracterized Samantha MacBride’s position.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the recycling symbol lost its meaning on Jun 12, 2024.
With much of the southwest baking under record temperatures, immigrants’ rights advocates worry President Joe Biden’s decision to effectively close the border to asylum seekers for the foreseeable future will endanger lives and further marginalize climate-displaced people seeking refuge in the U.S.
Their concerns come as a heat dome lingering over Mexico and the southwestern United States has obliterated temperature records from Phoenix to Sacramento, California. The searing conditions had health officials urging people to limit their time outdoors and take other steps to protect themselves from a climate-charged high pressure system that has killed dozens of people across several states in Mexico. The promise of a hotter-than-average summer has raised fears that Biden’s directive, which allows the government to suspend border crossings when they surpass 2,500 daily, will lead to a surge in heat-related illnesses and possibly deaths.
“This executive order being issued at this time is an additional cruelty that will force more people into dangerous conditions where they’re exposed to a really severe climate impact,” said Ahmed Gaya, director of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the National Partnership for New Americans.
The order Biden signed June 4 followed mounting calls from Republicans and Democrats alike to curb the flow of migration at the southern border. The declaration, which took effect immediately and has already led to thousands of deportations, will be lifted only when the seven-day average of encounters between ports of entry from Mexico dips below 1,500 per day, something the Associated Press reported hasn’t happened since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden’s decision to drastically regulate a legal pathway into the country for the bulk of migrants at the southern border, with limited exceptions such as unaccompanied minors, is “clearly a political stunt,” Gaya said. “Given the fact that many of the people at the border have climate driving the root cause of their migration and need to seek safety, they are now at the border being forced to wait in limbo indefinitely, while their asylum is shut down under this order, and being exposed to severe climate impacts that risk their lives,” he said.
Dangerous heat already poses a lethal threat for many at the border. Earlier this month, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, in El Paso identified four people, presumed to be migrants, who died of heat-related illnesses while crossing the border, as reported by the Guardian. Last year’s record temperatures are believed to have contributed to more than 100 deaths in the same area. Some immigration advocates worry the administration’s edict will create an even worse environment for asylum seekers.
“This policy’s implementation collides with the hottest, most dangerous months on record as the climate crisis continues to accelerate,” said Kim Nolte, CEO of Migrant Clinicians Network. “We fear that this policy will result in more deaths as desperate people are pushed further and further into remote and lethally hot areas to cross the border.”
Past research on the risks of climate migration faced by people around the world suggest this could very well be the case. “As temperatures increase, we will absolutely see higher mortality, illness, death and injury for these asylum seekers that are coming to the U.S., seeking safety,” said Anne Junod, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who studies climate migration.
The Biden administration’s directive is “actually more extreme” than similar policies the Trump administration enacted, and just as unlikely to hold up in court, said Sarah Rich, senior supervising attorney and interim senior policy counsel at the Southern Poverty Law Center. (The American Civil Liberties Union has announced its intention to sue the Biden administration over the order.)
Border Patrol agents have already begun turning back migrants at the international border to prevent them from reaching U.S. soil — a revival of a controversial Trump-era policy of physically blocking asylum seekers from entering the country, which is required to claim asylum.
Beyond barring entry, Biden’s proclamation denies asylum to all who enter between ports, increases the legal standards required to receive asylum, and gives those seeking it only four hours to prepare for their initial interview, including attempts to contact and consult with legal counsel, according to Rich. It also means that the only way to be granted asylum in the U.S. is to make an appointment via the CBP One app, which can take months and is “essentially a lottery system,” she said.
The immigrant rights community in the U.S., is, according to Rich, collectively opposed to the Biden administration’s latest executive action. “We are upset. We are disappointed. Many people are enraged by this. It feels like a real betrayal,” she said.
Others are also concerned over what this signals for the push to allow people displaced by climate change to seek refugee status in the U.S., particularly for a president who just three years ago signed an executive order instructing the government to examine the impact of climate change on migration.
One of the Biden administration’s first actions coming into office was making climate-related migration a priority, noted Gaya, but the administration has since moved in the opposite direction. “This further goes down the wrong road, in the wrong direction, by cutting off more avenues for folks who are seeking asylum, often on grounds that include climate impacts, from doing so,” he said. “This executive order is both a deep disappointment on President Biden’s immigration promises, as well as on his hopes to be a climate leader.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s border restrictions are stranding climate migrants in extreme heat on Jun 12, 2024.
