The Nile is one of the world’s most famous rivers. It’s also Africa’s most important freshwater system. About 300 million people live in the 11 countries it flows through. Many rely on its waters for agriculture and fishing to make a living.

The Nile’s two main tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, come together in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. This industrial hub has grown rapidly over the past few decades.

The Nile is not immune to the same pollutants that affect rivers all over the world. Plastic debris is of particular concern. Over time plastics break down into smaller pieces known as microplastics. These are tiny plastic particles with a maximum size of five millimetres, all the way down to the nanoscale. Recent research found that

rivers are modelled to export up to 25,000 tons of plastics from their sub-basins to seas annually. Over 80% of this amount is microplastic.

This has huge negative consequences for biodiversity and the climate. As microplastics degrade, scientists have found, they produce greenhouse gases. Airborne microplastics may influence the climate by scattering and absorbing solar and terrestrial radiation, leading to atmospheric warming or cooling depending on particle size, shape and composition. It also negatively affects animal and human health. Microplastics have been shown in laboratory studies to be toxic to animals and cells.

Much of the research about microplastics in African waters has focused on marine and coastal areas. To address this gap, I conducted a study to assess the presence of microplastics in the River Nile in Khartoum. My students and I tested for the presence of microplastics in Nile tilapia. This popular African freshwater fish species forms the basis of commercial fisheries in many African countries, including Sudan.

Photo by Islam Hassan on Unsplash

The results do not make for happy reading. In the 30 freshly caught fish we surveyed, we found a total of 567 microplastic particles. This shows that the River Nile is contaminated with microplastics that can be consumed or absorbed in various ways by the tilapia and other aquatic organisms.

Our sample

The fish used in our study were caught just after the meeting point of the two Niles, known in Arabic as Al-Mogran.

We visited the Al-Mawrada fish market in the Omdurman area, which is also alongside the Nile. All 30 specimens we bought were freshly caught.

We dissected the fish to remove their digestive tracts. The individual tracts were treated so they would digest any organic matter they contained without interfering with the analysis of microplastics. The resulting solution was subject to another extraction procedure and we then conducted physical and chemical analyses.

Every specimen had microplastics in its digestive tract.

The number ranged from as few as five to as many as 47 particles per single fish. In total we identified 567 particles. This is high compared to studies that have reported microplastics in tilapia species in other rivers and lakes. There is, as yet, no global guideline or standard for what might be an “acceptable” number.

Shape, size and colour

We detected different sizes of microplastics (0.04mm to 4.94mm), shapes (fibres, fragments, films, foams and pellets) and colours. The most common were very small (less than 1mm), fibrous – they appear slender and elongated – and coloured (dyed).

These characteristics make sense because of how fish and other aquatic organisms feed. Nile tilapia are versatile feeders: they consume a variety of organisms including phytoplankton, aquatic plants, invertebrates, detritus, bacterial films, as well as other fish and fish eggs. That puts them at a high risk of ingesting microplastics.

Nile tilapia are also more likely to consume particles that are within a similar size range as their natural prey, as well as the same shape and colour.

Smaller microplastics are especially good carriers for other pollutants such as heavy metals, resulting in additional health risks. Their small size also makes it easier for them to move into organs like the liver. Studies have found microplastics in the tissues, muscles, livers, blubber and lungs of other aquatic as well as marine mammal species.

Fibres, the most dominant shape found in our specimens, stay in the intestine for longer than other microplastic shapes. This, too, can lead to health problems for the fish. Coloured microplastics contain dyes, many of which contain toxic chemicals.

This all has serious implications for human health, as people catch and eat the fish, which introduces those microplastics and associated chemicals into their bloodstreams.

Pollution sources

Where does all this plastic originate? For starters, 65% of plastic waste in Khartoum is disposed of in open dumps. From there, it contaminates water bodies and other parts of the environment.

Image by Refaat Naiem from Pixabay

The city’s wastewater treatment system is ineffective. The three wastewater treatment plants in Khartoum state, Karary, Wd-Daffiaa and Soba, are outdated and do not meet local and international standards. That means untreated effluent from domestic, industrial and agricultural activities is another probable source of microplastic pollution.

There are also countless recreational sites along the River Nile in Khartoum. The Nile Street is the most popular in the capital city, hosting water sports, restaurants, cafes, clubs, event venues and hotels, as well as the tea ladies (women who serve hot beverages from makeshift mobile cafes along the banks of the river). However, waste disposal and collection practices are sorely lacking, so plastic litter from these leisure activities leaks into the river.

No easy fix

Tackling microplastic pollution is not easy. It will require technological advances, as well as the collective efforts of consumers, producers, governments and the scientific community.

As consumers, we need to change our behaviour around plastic products, especially single-use plastics. For example, opt for fabric shopping bags instead of plastic bags; use glass and metal containers. Recycling is also important.

Governments must enforce waste management regulations and improve waste management practices, as well as helping to improve public awareness. Strategies and policies must explicitly feature microplastics.

Scientists can not only fill the knowledge gaps around microplastics. Communicating scientific findings is crucial; so too is developing innovations to protect against microplastics and their harmful effects.

I would like to thank and acknowledge my student Hadeel Alamin, who conducted this study with me.

Dalia Saad, Researcher, School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Microplastic pollution is a global environmental problem that is ubiquitous in all environments, including air, water and soils.

Microplastics are readily found in treated wastewater sludge — also known as municipal biosolids — that eventually make their way to our agricultural soils.

Our recent investigation of microplastic levels in Canadian municipal biosolids found that a single gram of biosolids contains hundreds of microplastic particles. This is a much greater concentration of microplastics than is typically found in air, water or soil.

Given that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of biosolids are produced every year in Canada, we need to pay close attention to the potential impacts such high levels of microplastics might have on the environment and find ways to reduce microplastic levels in Canada’s wastewater stream.

Municipal biosolids

Municipal biosolids are produced at wastewater treatment plants by settling and stabilizing the solid fraction of the municipal wastewater inflow.

In Canada and around the world, municipal biosolids are used to improve agricultural farmland soil. This is because they are rich in nutrients needed for plant growth, such as phosphorus and nitrogen.

Municipal biosolid applications are carefully regulated in Canada for heavy metals, nutrients and pathogens. However, guidelines for emerging contaminants, such as microplastics, are not currently available.

While current wastewater treatment plants are not explicitly designed to remove microplastics, they are nevertheless efficient at removing nearly 90 per cent of microplastic contaminants. The removed microplastics are often concentrated in the settled sludge and eventually end up in the biosolids.

Microplastics in municipal biosolids

Previous studies have shown that municipal biosolid waste is an important pathway for microplastics to enter the broader terrestrial ecosystems, including agricultural fields.

In collaboration with scientists from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, we conducted the first pan-Canadian assessment of microplastics in municipal biosolids. We analyzed biosolid samples from 22 Canadian wastewater treatment plants across nine provinces and two biosolid-based fertilizer products.

We found hundreds of microplastic particles in every gram of biosolids. The most common type of microplastic particles we observed were microfibres, followed by small fragments. We found small amounts of glitter and foam pieces too.

Microplastic concentrations in municipal biosolids are substantially higher than other environmental networks in Canada like water, soil and river sediments. This provides further evidence that microplastics are concentrated in biosolids produced at wastewater treatment plants.

Reducing microplastics

Wastewater treatment plants are well-equipped to remove large plastics like bottle caps and plastic bags from municipal wastewater. However, microplastic particles are so small they can’t be caught by current treatment infrastructure, so they end up concentrating in wastewater sludge.

As wastewater streams concentrate microplastics, they also offer an opportunity to reduce the plastic pollution that is entering the environment. While researchers across Canada are working to find insights on the short- and long-term ecological consequences of microplastic pollution on soil ecosystems, one solution is already clear.

Microplastics can be reduced at sources via systematic reductions in the use of single-use plastics, washing clothing with synthetic fibre less frequently and removing microfibres using washing machine filters. These approaches will help minimize the amount of microplastics that get into the wastewater stream and, ultimately, into the broader terrestrial and aquatic environments.

Building new technologies at our wastewater treatment plants to remove microplastics through physical or chemical means should also be explored.

We need to better understand the impact of high concentrations of microplastic on agro-ecosystems where biosolids are applied, including its impacts on soil-dwelling organisms like earthworms and insects. We also need to start building national guidelines for microplastic levels in biosolids and agricultural soils.

Branaavan Sivarajah, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University and Jesse Vermaire, Associate Professor, Institute of Environmental Science, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image: In Canada and around the world, biosolids are widely used to improve agricultural farmland soil. Biosolids being sprayed on an agricultural field.
(Branaavan Sivarajah), Author provided

Plastic pollution has become such major problem that it’s threatening our human rights. That’s the view of two UN special rapporteurs (human rights advisers) who recently issued a joint statement, warning against the “overwhelming toxic tidal wave” of plastic endangering us and the environment “in a myriad of ways over its life cycle”. They called for urgent action on dealing with this global crisis.

Such a call could not be timelier, as governments have achieved disappointingly little so far. Yes, most restrict single-use plastic bags, or some other type of single-use plastics. But such measures are clearly not enough.

Even the UN treaty on plastic pollution, which has been agreed in principle and is currently being negotiated, is unlikely to produce fundamental change, at least in the short term. And there is no guarantee any new measures it leads to would have a different fate from the many existing plastic pollution laws that governments fail to implement.

Amid growing concerns over plastic pollution and weak governmental response to it, individuals and communities have been seeking action by resorting to courts. I recently published an academic study on the global tug of war over plastic going on in courts in more than 30 countries.

I found lots of different approaches. Some argue that their governments do not implement the existing laws. For instance, a group in the Philippines has persuaded the country’s supreme court to review the government’s implementation of solid waste management law.

Others claim that their governments do not consider the impacts of plastic pollution when allowing new factories making plastic products. One group of Māori in New Zealand recently appealed a decision to expand a billion-bottle-per-year water plant.

Some seek compensation from plastic-producing companies for dumping waste into rivers, such as the Texas residents who won a US$50 million (£39 million) settlement after finding billions of plastic pellets in their local waterways.

Local governments are also increasingly turning to courts claiming that businesses deceptively market their plastic products as recyclable. Cases like these send a clear message to the governments and businesses that individuals and communities are concerned about the impacts of plastic pollution and want more decisive action to stop it.

But at the same time, all these cases are only one part of the picture. Increasing restrictions on plastic products also result in claims brought by businesses that oppose such measures, including the producers of plastic products as well as supermarkets and restaurants, and ask the courts to quash them.

Image by Rosy from Pixabay

Cases where businesses argue that restrictions on plastic products cause economic loss or are scientifically unsubstantiated are very common throughout the world.

Businesses also regularly challenge provinces or cities that adopt additional restrictions to the ones imposed by national authorities. Such cases send the message that our society is still massively dependent on plastic products, and so measures to address plastic pollution need to be systemic.

The role of courts in tackling plastic pollution

The courts’ involvement has direct consequences for any attempts to tackle this global crisis and for action on environmental and health protection more generally. For example, businesses might be able to persuade a court to declare local anti-plastic pollution measures invalid.

This happened in Mexico recently when the nation’s supreme court ruled a ban on single-use plastics by the state of Oaxaca was unconstitutional. The success of such cases can prompt other businesses to challenge local environmental and health protection measures.

On the other hand, if a court upholds such measures, other local governments may decide to follow the example of their neighbours and introduce such measures as well. If anti-plastic pollution measures already exist, they can be used to persuade the courts that further action should be taken.

Similarly, by holding businesses accountable for pollution resulting from various stages of plastic life cycle, courts help protect vulnerable individuals and communities from various human rights violations caused by plastic pollution.

No single country has a comprehensive response to plastic pollution. But many are gradually tightening up measures on single-use plastics which moves the world closer towards a comprehensive regulatory response to this crisis.

Courts will undoubtedly continue playing an important role in this process. Those concerned about plastic pollution will keep pressing for tighter regulation, while those who oppose regulation will have more restrictions to challenge.

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Sam Varvastian, Lecturer in Law, Cardiff University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – People once believed the planet could always accommodate us. That the resilience of the Earth system meant nature would always provide. But we now know this is not necessarily the case. As big as the world is, our impact is bigger.

In research released today, an international team of scientists from the Earth Commission, of which we were part, identified eight “safe” and “just” boundaries spanning five vital planetary systems: climate change, the biosphere, freshwater, nutrient use in fertilisers and air pollution. This is the first time an assessment of boundaries has quantified the harms to people from changes to the Earth system.

“Safe” means boundaries maintaining stability and resilience of our planetary systems on which we rely. “Just”, in this work, means boundaries which minimise significant harm to people. Together, they’re a health barometer for the planet.

Assessing our planet’s health is a big task. It took the expertise of 51 world-leading researchers from natural and social sciences. Our methods included modelling, literature reviews and expert judgement. We assessed factors such as tipping point risks, declines in Earth system functions, historical variability and effects on people.

Alarmingly, we found humanity has exceeded the safe and just limits for four of five systems. Aerosol pollution is the sole exception. Urgent action, based on the best available science, is now needed.

So, what did we find?

Our work builds on the influential concepts of planetary boundaries by finding ways to quantify what just systems look like alongside safety.

Importantly, the safe and just boundaries are defined at local to global spatial scales appropriate for assessing and managing planetary systems – as small as one square kilometre in the case of biodiversity. This is crucial because many natural functions act at local scales.

Here are the boundaries:

1. Climate boundary – keep warming to 1℃

We know the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5℃ avoids a high risk of triggering dangerous climate tipping points.

But even now, with warming at 1.2℃, many people around the world are being hit hard by climate-linked disasters, such as the recent extreme heat in China, fires in Canada, severe floods in Pakistan and droughts in the United States and the Horn of Africa.

At 1.5℃, hundreds of millions of people could be exposed to average annual temperatures over 29℃, which is outside the human climate niche and can be fatal. That means a just boundary for climate is nearer to 1°C. This makes the need to halt further carbon emissions even more urgent.

2. Biosphere boundaries: Expand intact ecosystems to cover 50-60% of the earth

A healthy biosphere ensures a safe and just planet by storing carbon, maintaining global water cycles and soil quality, protecting pollinators and many other ecosystem services. To safeguard these services, we need 50 to 60% of the world’s land to have largely intact natural ecosystems.

Recent research puts the current figure at between 45% and 50%, which includes vast areas of land with relatively low populations, including parts of Australia and the Amazon rainforest. These areas are already under pressure from climate change and other human activity.

Image by Rosina Kaiser from Pixabay

Locally, we need about 20-25% of each square kilometre of farms, towns, cities or other human-dominated landscapes to contain largely intact natural ecosystems. At present, only a third of our human-dominated landscapes meet this threshold.

3. Freshwater boundaries: Keep groundwater levels up and don’t suck rivers dry

Too much freshwater is a problem, as unprecedented floods in Australia and Pakistan show. And too little is also a problem, with unprecedented droughts taking their toll on food production.

To bring fresh water systems back into balance, a rule of thumb is to avoid taking or adding more than 20% of a river or stream’s water in any one month, in the absence of local knowledge of environmental flows.

At present, 66% of the world’s land area meets this boundary, when flows are averaged over the year. But human settlement has a major impact: less than half of the world’s population lives in these areas. Groundwater, too, is overused. At present, almost half the world’s land is subject to groundwater overextraction.

4. Fertiliser and nutrient boundaries: Halve the runoff from fertilisers

When farmers overuse fertilisers on their fields, rain washes nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into rivers and oceans. These nutrients can trigger algal blooms, damage ecosystems and worsen drinking water quality.

Yet many farming regions in poorer countries don’t have enough fertiliser, which is unjust.

Worldwide, our nitrogen and phosphorus use are up to double their safe and just boundaries. While this needs to be reduced in many countries, in other parts of the world fertiliser use can safely increase.

5. Aerosol pollution boundary: Sharply reduce dangerous air pollution and reduce regional differences

New research shows differences in concentration of aerosol pollutants between Northern and Southern hemispheres could disrupt wind patterns and monsoons if pollutant levels keep increasing. That is, air pollution could actually upend weather systems.

At present, aerosol concentrations have not yet reached weather-changing levels. But much of the world is exposed to dangerous levels of fine particle pollution (known as PM 2.5) in the air, causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths a year.

We must significantly reduce these pollutants to safer levels – under 15 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

We must act

We must urgently navigate towards a safe and just future, and strive to return our planetary systems back within safe and just boundaries through just means.

To stop human civilisation from pushing the Earths’s systems out of balance, we will have to tackle the many ways we damage the planet.

To work towards a world compatible with the Earth’s limits means setting and achieving science-based targets. To translate these boundaries to actions will require urgent support from government to create regulatory and incentive-based systems to drive the changes needed.

Setting boundaries and targets is vital. The Paris Agreement galvanised faster action on climate. But we need similar boundaries to ensure the future holds fresh water, clean air, a planet still full of life and a good life for humans.

We would like to acknowledge support from the Earth Commission, which is hosted by Future Earth, and is the science component of the Global Commons Alliance

Steven J Lade, Resilience researcher at Australian National University, Australian National University; Ben Stewart-Koster, Senior research fellow, Griffith University; Stuart Bunn, Professor, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Syezlin Hasan, Research fellow, Griffith University, and Xuemei Bai, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For many Muslims breaking fast in mosques around the world this Ramadan, something will be missing: plastics.

The communal experience of iftars – the after-sunset meal that brings people of the faith together during the holy month starting on March 22, 2023 – often necessitates the use of utensils designed for mass events, such as plastic knives and forks, along with bottles of water.

But to encourage Muslims to be more mindful of the impact of Ramadan on the environment, mosques are increasingly dispensing of single-use items, with some banning the use of plastics altogether.

As a historian of Islam, I see this “greening” of Ramadan as entirely in keeping with the traditions of the faith, and in particular the observance of Ramadan.

The month – during which observant Muslims must abstain from even a sip of water or food from sun up to sun down – is a time for members of the faith to focus on purifying themselves as individuals against excess and materialism.

But in recent years, Muslim communities around the world have used the period to rally around themes of social awareness. And this includes understanding the perils of wastefulness and embracing the link between Ramadan and environmental consciousness.

The ban on plastics – a move encouraged by the Muslim Council of Britain as a way for Muslims “to be mindful of [God’s] creation and care for the environment” – is just one example.

Many other mosques and centers are discouraging large or extravagant evening meals altogether. The fear is such communal events generate food waste and overconsumption and often rely on nonbiodegradable materials for cutlery, plates and serving platters.

Photo by Kizkopop on Unsplash

Quranic environmentalism

While the move toward environmental consciousness has gained traction in Muslim communities in recent years, the links between Islam and sustainability can be found in the faith’s foundational texts.

Scholars have long emphasized principles outlined in the Quran that highlight conservation, reverence for living creatures and the diversity of living things as a reminder of God’s creation.

The Quran repeatedly emphasizes the idea of “mizan,” a kind of cosmic and natural balance, and the role of humans as stewards and khalifa, or “viceregents,” on Earth – terms that also carry an environmental interpretation.

Recently, Islamic environmental activists have highlighted the numerous hadith – sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that provide guidance to followers of the faith – that emphasize that Muslims should avoid excess, respect resources and living things, and consume in moderation.

Although present from the outset of the faith, Islam’s ties to environmentalism received major visibility with the works of Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago in 1966. The lectures and a subsequent book, “Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man,” warned that humans had broken their relationship with nature and thus placed themselves in grave ecological danger.

Nasr blamed modern and Western science for being materialistic, utilitarian and inhuman, claiming it had destroyed traditional views of nature. Nasr argued that Islamic philosophy, metaphysics, scientific tradition, arts and literature emphasize the spiritual significance of nature. But he noted that numerous contemporary factors, such as mass rural-to-urban migration and poor and autocratic leadership, had prevented the Muslim world from realizing and implementing the Islamic view of the natural environment.

Scholars and activists expanded on Nasr’s work through the 1980s and 1990s, among them Fazlun Khalid, one of the world’s leading voices on Islam and environmentalism. In 1994, Khalid founded the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, an organization dedicated to the maintenance of the planet as a healthy habitat for all living beings. Khalid and other Muslim environmentalists suggest that Islam’s nearly 2 billion adherents can participate in the tasks of environmental sustainability and equity not through Western models and ideologies but from within their own traditions.

Partnering with the United Nations Environment Program, Khalid and other leading scholars crafted Al-Mizan, a worldwide project for Muslim leaders interested in Muslims’ religious commitments to nature. “The ethos of Islam is that it integrates belief with a code of conduct which pays heed to the essence of the natural world,” Khalid wrote in “Signs on the Earth: Islam, Modernity, and the Climate Crisis.”

Going beyond an eco-Ramadan

Environmental crises disproportionately affect the world’s poorest populations, and academics have highlighted
the particular vulnerabilities of Muslim communities around the world, such as the victims of devastating floods in Pakistan in 2022.

By highlighting Islamic principles, policies and community approaches, academics have shown how Islam can represent a model for environmental stewardship.

This push for environmental consciousness extends beyond Ramadan. In recent years, Muslims have tried to introduce green practices into the shrine cities in Iraq during pilgrimage seasons in Ashura and Arbaeen.

Photo by kilarov zaneit on Unsplash

This has included awareness campaigns encouraging the 20 million pilgrims who visit Arbaeen annually to reduce the tons of trash they leave every year that clog up Iraq’s waterways. Quoting from Shiite scholarship and drawing on testimonials from community leaders, the Green Pilgrim movement suggests carrying cloth bags and reusable water bottles, turning down plastic cutlery, and hosting eco-friendly stalls along the walk.

Muslim-owned businesses and nonprofits are joining these wider efforts. Melanie Elturk, the founder of the successful hijab brand Haute Hijab, regularly ties together faith, fashion, commerce and environmentalism by highlighting the brand’s focus on sustainability and environmental impact. The Washington, D.C., nonprofit Green Muslims pioneered the first “leftar” – a play on the word “iftar” – using leftovers and reusable containers.

These efforts are but a few of the diverse ways that Muslim communities are addressing environmental impact. The greening of Ramadan fits into a broader conversation about how often communities can tackle climate change within their own frameworks.

But Islamic environmentalism is more than just the dispensing of plastic forks and water bottles – it taps into a worldview ingrained in the faith from the outset, and can continue to guide adherents as they navigate environmentalism, a space where they may otherwise be marginalized.

Noorzehra Zaidi, Assistant Professor of HIstory, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?”

This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab, a group of Australian and international scientists who study plastic pollution, adds to a growing body of evidence that ingesting plastic debris has discernible chronic effects on the animals that consume it. This work represents a crucial step: moving from knowing that plastic is everywhere to diagnosing its effects once ingested.

From individual to species-level effects

There’s wide agreement that the world is facing a plastic pollution crisis. This deluge of long-lived debris has generated gruesome photos of dead seabirds and whales with their stomachs full of plastic.

But while consuming plastic likely killed these individual animals, deaths directly attributable to plastic ingestion have not yet been shown to cause population-level effects on species – that is, declines in population numbers over time that are linked to chronic health effects from a specific pollutant.

MBARI: “Microplastics in the ocean: A deep dive on plastic pollution in Monterey Bay”

One well-known example of a pollutant with dramatic population effects is the insecticide DDT, which was widely used across North America in the 1950s and 1960s. DDT built up in the environment, including in fish that eagles, osprey and other birds consumed. It caused the birds to lay eggs with shells so thin that they often broke in the nest.

DDT exposure led to dramatic population declines among bald eagles, ospreys and other raptors across the U.S. They gradually began to recover after the Environmental Protection Agency banned most uses of DDT in 1972.

Ingesting plastic can harm wildlife without causing death via starvation or intestinal blockage. But subtler, sublethal effects, like those described above for DDT, could be much farther-reaching.

Numerous laboratory studies, some dating back a decade, have demonstrated chronic effects on invertebrates, mammals, birds and fish from ingesting plastic. They include changes in behavior, loss of body weight and condition, reduced feeding rates, decreased ability to produce offspring, chemical imbalances in organisms’ bodies and changes in gene expression, to name a few.

However, laboratory studies are often poor representations of reality. Documenting often-invisible, sublethal effects in wild animals that are definitively linked to plastic itself has remained elusive. For example, in 2022, colleagues and I published a study that found that some baleen whales ingest millions of microplastics per day when feeding, but we have not yet uncovered any effects on the whales’ health.

Scarring seabirds’ digestive tracts

The Adrift Lab’s research focuses on the elegant flesh-footed shearwater (Ardenna carneipes), a medium-size seabird with dark feathers and a powerful hooked bill. The lab studied shearwaters nesting on Lord Howe Island, a tiny speck of land 6 miles long by one mile wide (16 square kilometers) in the Tasman Sea east of Australia.

This region has only moderate levels of floating plastic pollution. But shearwaters, as well as petrels and albatrosses, are part of a class known as tube-nosed seabirds, with tubular nostrils and an excellent senses of smell. As I have found in my own research, tube-nosed seabirds are highly skilled at seeking out plastic debris, which may smell like a good place to find food because of algae that coats it in the water. Indeed, the flesh-footed shearwater has one of the highest plastic ingestion rates of any species yet studied.

Marine ecologist Jennifer Lavers, head of the Adrift Lab, has been studying plastic debris consumption in this wild shearwater population for over a decade. In 2014 the lab began publishing research linking ingested plastic to sublethal health effects.

In 2019, Lavers led a study that described correlations between ingested plastic and various aspects of blood chemistry. Birds that ingested more plastic had lower blood calcium levels, along with higher levels of cholesterol and uric acid.

In January 2023, Lavers’ group published a paper that found multiorgan damage in these shearwaters from ingesting both microplastic fragments, measuring less than a quarter inch (five millimeters) across, and larger macroplastic particles. These findings included the first description of overproduction of scar tissue in the birds’ proventriculus – the part of their stomach where chemical digestion occurs.

This process, known as fibrosis, is a sign that the body is responding to injury or damage. In humans, fibrosis is found in the lungs of longtime smokers and people with repeated, prolonged exposure to asbestos. It also is seen in the livers of heavy drinkers. A buildup of excessive scar tissue leads to reduced organ function, and may allow diseases to enter the body via the damaged organs.

A new age of plastic disease

The Adrift Lab’s newest paper takes these findings still further. The researchers found a positive relationship between the amount of plastic in the proventriculus and the degree of scarring. They concluded that ingested plastic was causing the scarring, a phenomenon they call “plasticosis.”

Many species of birds purposefully consume small stones and grit, which collect in their gizzards – the second part of their stomachs – and help the birds digest their food by pulverizing it. Critically, however, this grit, which is sometimes called pumice, is not associated with fibrosis.

Scientists have observed associations between plastic ingestion and pathogenic illness in fish. Plasticosis may help explain how pathogens find their way into the body via a lacerated digestive tract.

Seabirds were the first sentinels of possible risks to marine life from plastics: A 1969 study described examining young Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) that had died in Hawaii and finding plastic in their stomachs. So perhaps it is fitting that the first disease attributed specifically to marine plastic debris has also been described in a seabird. In my view, plasticosis could be a sign that a new age of disease is upon us because of human overuse of plastics and other long-lasting contaminants, and their leakage into the environment.

In 2022, United Nations member nations voted to negotiate a global treaty to end plastic pollution, with a target completion date of 2024. This would be the first binding agreement to address plastic pollution in a concerted and coordinated manner. The identification of plasticosis in shearwaters shows that there is no time to waste.

Matthew Savoca, Postdoctoral researcher, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In a massive feat of irony, Coca-Cola, the world’s largest plastic polluter, is sponsoring COP27, the world’s largest annual environmental conference, which will take place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, from November 6–18.

While there is plenty to criticize about this year’s COP27 summit (such as Egypt’s human rights abuses and civil society crackdown), Coca-Cola’s sponsorship is incredibly problematic and may even set back the environmental and anti-plastic movements.

Egypt announced the sponsorship deal at the end of September, and Coke immediately seized the positive publicity. Coca-Cola Global Vice-President, Public Policy and Sustainability Michael Goltzman said: “Through the COP27 partnership, the Coca-Cola system aims to support collective action against climate change.”

But activists are rightfully pushing back — and the opposition is growing.

The civil society organization, Clean up Kenya, called the move “disgusting” and noted that nearly half of the plastic bottle waste found in Kenya could be traced back to Coke.

Ugandan Climate activist and UNOCHA Ambassador, Nyombi Morris, told the BBC: “When polluters dominate climate negotiations, we don’t get good results. As an African activist, I am concerned that more of our lakes are going to be filled with plastics again.”

Residents in low-income countries have legitimate reasons to be angry at Coke. The corporate giant has spent billions of dollars funneling its product into low- and middle-income countries but rarely puts any effort into ensuring these places have adequate infrastructure to manage the incoming waste.

Indonesia, a country notoriously overrun with plastic pollution, has experienced this first-hand. According to Nina van Toulon, founder and director of the Indonesian Waste Platform. “You go to the most remote village here, hours from anywhere, and there is bottled water and Coke. But then the people in the village burn it. These companies have made the effort to get their products to these villages, but they don’t make the effort to get the plastic back from the villages.”

A change.org petition demanding the UN remove Coca-Cola as a sponsor was created in October and has garnered over 236,000 signatures so far. The organizer posted the following statement along with the petition:

I was a delegate at COP26 in Glasgow. Most days I felt despair – some days I cried. The infiltration of corporations into the conference was sickening – the collected CEOs of the world’s biggest polluters, brazenly lobbying politicians to protect their interests and inflate their profits, telling us how we could save the planet if we bought more of their stuff.

COP conferences are supposed to be gatherings of national leaders, engaged in urgent negotiations to prevent climate change, not a multi-million dollar jamboree for corporate polluters and their lobbyists.

The UNFCCC must stop receiving corporate sponsorship today – starting with ejecting Coca-Cola as sponsor of COP27.

This is a textbook case of corporate greenwashing — Coca-Cola gets to boost its brand name and associate itself with the environmental movement, making it seem like it is part of the solution instead of one of the primary problem causers.

In reality, a 2021 brand audit report from the NGO Break Free From Plastic has found Cola-Cola to be the world’s biggest plastic polluter for four years in a row. And though 2022’s results are still pending, it is likely that it will win again this year.

In 2019, the company admitted that it uses 3 million metric tons of plastic packaging in a year. It also produces 120 billion single-use plastic bottles every year.

Environmental activist John Hocevar, Greenpeace USA Oceans Campaign director, says the sponsorship “undermines the very objective of the event it seeks to sponsor.” Adding, “Coca-Cola produces 120 billion throwaway plastic bottles a year — and 99 percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, worsening both the plastic and climate crisis.”

Coca-Cola’s plastic problem

In February this year, Coca-Cola made broad climate pledges that it will reduce its plastic output by 25 percent by 2030; however, it has failed to release any concrete plan for doing so and, thus far, seems more interested in greenwashing its brand than finding real solutions.

In its 2021 report, Break Free From Plastic found that in 2019, Coca-Cola invested USD 4.24 billion on advertising and marketing and just USD 11 million on its environmental initiatives that year: a river cleanup program. This reeks of a PR stunt rather than a genuine commitment to cleaning up communities affected by plastic pollution. The report read:

The best way for Coca-Cola to address its plastic footprint is by producing less of it in the first place, not by cleaning it up once it is already in the environment. Top plastic polluters like Coca-Cola would rather spend money on greenwashing instead of redesigning their product packaging or system of delivering their products to consumers. By failing to take real action to address the problem at source, these corporate polluters are passing the burden to those least responsible for the climate and plastic crises — especially young people, low-income communities, and countries in the Global South.

And the evidence only confirms Break Free From Plastic’s assertion. An investigative report and leaked recording published by The Intercept revealed that for decades Coca-Cola lobbied against plastic control policies in the US, which would have made companies responsible for the plastic waste they generate. It threw millions toward anti-recycling bills and pushed hard against any accountability. The recordings are damning and give ugly insight into how lobbying works in the mega-corporate sphere — in other words, money is power and power is influence.

If we are going to make any lasting sustainability shifts, this system needs to change. Corporations should not be able to buy their way out of emission responsibility. If climate predictions are correct, we (optimistically) have about nine years to avert climate catastrophe. To do this, corporate polluters need to radically transform their business models — or we as citizens need to transform it for them and reject companies that see environmental commitments merely as a corporate marketing tool.

Until Coca-Cola comes to the table in good faith, with a concrete sustainability plan, it should not be taken seriously as a purveyor of climate solutions — and definitely should not be sponsoring the largest environmental conference of the year. Until then, it is just another corporation trying to win over customers with a shiny green veneer.

If COP27 organizers and UN officials really want to make a difference in the fight against climate change, they will take a hard stand and reject Coca-Cola’s sponsorship.

The Bridge features personal essays, commentary, and creative non-fiction that illuminate differences in perception between local and international coverage of news events, from the unique perspective of members of the Global Voices community. Views expressed do not necessarily represent the opinion of the community as a whole. All Posts

Written bySydney Allen

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Coca-Cola plastic bottles in a river. Image via Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0

This spring, I taught a new undergraduate course in environmental sociology. Most of my students took the course because they were curious to see what their desire to live more sustainably had to do with sociology.

By the third week – after a deep dive into the troubling connections between fossil capitalism (the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels), waste colonialism (the unjust international trade and disposal of hazardous waste between countries) and environmental injustice – a few students said glumly that they had thought the course would be more optimistic.

During the fourth week, we explored the well-documented history of climate denial and deception among fossil fuel companies, as well as the related “deceit and denial” tactics of the tobacco, lead and chemical industries. “Do you think it’s really true?” one student asked me imploringly. “Do you think that businesses are really that unsustainable and will never change?”

I hesitated. I wanted my students to consider complex environmental problems from a critical sociological perspective, but I didn’t want to lead them down a pessimistic path. “Well,” I admitted, “I did just write a book about the plastics industry with the subtitle ‘how corporations are fuelling the ecological crisis and what we can do about it’”.

It’s hard to avoid pessimism when you witness firsthand the obstinacy of socially and environmentally damaging industries. Early in 2019, I attended a plastics industry conference in the wake of the marine plastic crisis, prompted by public outrage over viral images of marine wildlife choking on plastic. The crisis prompted a swift response from plastic-related corporations, who attempted to frame the problem in terms of littering and waste rather than overproduction. “We need to get the image of plastic in the oceans out of the public’s mind,” exclaimed a corporate executive at the conference. “We need to make plastic fantastic again.”

Since the dramatic rise of plastic production across the world after the second world war, petrochemical and plastics companies have fought to expand and protect their markets through creating demand for plastic products, denying toxic risks and shifting blame for pollution onto consumers. And despite increasing public awareness of (and regulations on) plastic pollution, the global plastic crisis is only getting worse.

My new book, Plastic Unlimited, sheds light on the corporate roots of this crisis. In it, I address the concept of the “corporate playbook” used by big oil, big tobacco, and, more recently, big plastic.

Playbook tactics

The corporate playbook often contains a common repertoire of strategies used by controversial industries to conceal or cast doubt on the harmful effects of their products. Champions of these strategies have been dubbed “merchants of doubt” and accused of offences from downplaying the health risks of smoking to funding climate change denial.

As researcher David Michaels wrote in his exposé Doubt is Their Product, “the manipulation of science by the plastics industry was at least as flagrant and as self-serving as any other industry” he had researched – including the tobacco industry. Michaels was referring to the vinyl chloride scandals of the 1960s and 1970s, when leading chemical companies conspired to hide evidence about the toxic health effects of the vinyl chloride monomer on workers in chemical plants.

Big industry’s track record continues today. It has denied the toxic hazards of myriad petrochemicals and plastic products, funded climate misinformation campaigns, misled the public about the effectiveness of recycling, and lobbied to thwart and delay environmental regulations. During the pandemic, it also lobbied to promote single-use plastic bags as the “sanitary choice”.

Leading corporations also use offensive tactics, including directing attention to their role as so-called innovators in green tech. Take the circular economy, for example. It sounds like a great idea to try to eliminate waste by shifting from a linear “take-make-waste” economy to one in which existing materials are reused for as long as possible. But, crucially, no global or national policy visions of a circular economy for plastics go so far as to call for limiting plastic production altogether.

In fact, the plastics industry promotes the weakest form of the circular economy – recycling – which means plastic production can keep going, despite the reality that most items going into a recycling bin will end up being burned or dumped.

What’s more, recycling uses a lot of energy. Chemical recycling, for instance, involves returning plastics to their original molecular states to be used again. Although it’s promoted as a solution to the plastic crisis, it’s a toxic, carbon-intensive process that’s effectively the same as incineration.

Here’s some good news: in March 2022, the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi agreed on a mandate for a new global treaty to address the crisis. This was a landmark achievement towards creating legally binding measures to prevent toxic plastic pollution.

Many scientists, activists and organisations insist that any resulting treaty must include a cap on plastic production. The negotiations will be challenging, however, given businesses’ vested interests in keeping regulations focused on waste rather than production. Now, it’s urgent that we push back against greenwashing and work towards a global mandate for limiting unsustainable plastics growth.

Alice Mah, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sometimes it may seem that humans have altered the Earth beyond repair. But our planet is an incredible system in which energy, water, carbon and so much else flows and nurtures life. It is about 4.5 billion years old and has been through enormous changes.

Is it possible to heal the damage we have already done to the Earth? – Anthony, age 13

At some points in Earth’s history, fires burned over large areas. At others, much of it was covered with ice. There also have been mass extinctions that wiped out nearly every living thing on its surface.

Our living planet is incredibly resilient and can heal itself over time. The problem is that its self-healing systems are very, very slow. The Earth will be fine, but humans’ problems are more immediate.

People have damaged the systems that sustain us in many ways. We have polluted air and water, strewn plastic and other trash on land and in oceans and rivers, and destroyed habitats for plants and animals.

But we know how to help natural processes clean up many of these messes. And there has been a lot of progress since people started waking up to these problems 50 years ago.

There still are problems to solve. Some pollutants, like plastic, last for thousands of years, so it’s much better to stop releasing them than to try to collect them later. And extinction is permanent, so the only effective way to reduce it is to be more careful about protecting animals, plants and other species.

Reversing climate change

The most serious damage humans are doing to the Earth comes mainly from burning coal, oil and gas, which is dramatically warming its climate. Burning these carbon-based fuels is changing the fundamental chemistry and physics of the air and oceans.

Every lump of coal or gallon of gasoline that’s burned releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There it heats the Earth’s surface, causing floods, fires and droughts. Some of this added carbon dioxide dissolves into the oceans and makes them more acidic, which threatens ocean food webs.

Climate change is a problem that will get worse until humans stop making it worse – and then it will take many centuries for the climate to return to what it was like before the Industrial Revolution, when human actions started altering it on a large scale.

The only way to avoid making things worse is to stop setting carbon on fire. That means societies need to work hard to build an energy system that can help everyone live well without the need to burn carbon.

The good news is that we know how to make energy without releasing carbon dioxide and other pollution. Electricity made from solar, wind and geothermal power is now the cheapest energy in history. Cleaning up the global electricity supply and then electrifying everything can very quickly stop carbon pollution from getting worse.

This will require electric cars and trains, electric heating and cooking, and electric factories. We’ll also need new kinds of transmission and storage systems to get all that clean electricity from where it’s made to where it’s used.

The rest of the carbon mess can be cleaned up through better farm and forest management that stores carbon in land and plants instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. This is also a problem that scientists know how to solve.

The Earth will certainly heal, but it may take a very long time. The best way to start is with everyone doing their part to avoid making the damage any worse.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Scott Denning, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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