Sea life

Cartoon by Jonesy 

The most polluted cities

From Visual Capitalist 

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Shipping's fossil fuel problem

 From Jan Rosenow

40% of global shipping moves fossil fuels ⛽🚢 Double trouble: 1. Profits from hauling coal, oil and fossil gas 🛢️🔥 2. Ships run on bunker fuel—the sludge of oil refining 🏭

The livestock lobby wages war on Lab-Grown meat

Source: The Guardian

From George Monbiot at The Guardian

For many years, certain car manufacturers sought to obstruct the transition to electric vehicles. It’s not hard to see why: when you have invested heavily in an existing technology, you want to extract every last drop before disinvesting. But devious as in some cases these efforts were, they seem almost innocent in comparison with the concerted programme by a legacy industry and its tame politicians to suppress a far more important switch: the essential transition away from livestock farming.

Animal farming ranks alongside fossil fuel production as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth. It’s not just the vast greenhouse gas emissions and the water and air pollution it causes. Even more important is the amount of land it requires. Land use is a crucial environmental metric, because every hectare we occupy is a hectare that cannot support wild ecosystems.

Wild ecosystems are crucial for the survival of most species on Earth, and of Earth systems themselves: for example, the rainforest and cerrado of South America help to regulate weather systems. The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed above all by cattle ranching, whose expansion is driven in part by the foodie fad for “grass-fed” beef. The cerrado is being trashed primarily by soy farming to produce feed for pigs and chickens.

Feeding ourselves with animal products is a fantastically profligate and inefficient way of using land, swallowing at least four times as much as all the other food we grow while providing just 17% of our calories. More than any other factor, it drives the destruction of forests, wetlands, savannas, rivers and other habitats. Weaning ourselves off these products is as important as weaning ourselves off oil, gas and coal.

How can this be done? Moral suasion – seeking to convince people to switch to a plant-based diet for ethical reasons – is going nowhere: globally, meat-eating continues to rise while the percentage of vegans remains in low single figures in all but a few countries. I’ve long been convinced that the only effective strategy is to produce alternative products that are in effect indistinguishable from meat, dairy and eggs, but are cheaper and healthier. Around the world, scientists and startups are working on it.

There is a wide range of developing technologies, which are often misleadingly reduced to “lab-grown meat” or “cell-cultured meat”. What these terms originally meant was growing whole cuts in a bioreactor on a collagen scaffold. After initial enthusiasm, I came to see this as a dead end: it is simply too complicated and too expensive. Now the terms are often used to cover all new alternatives, including far simpler and cheaper technologies such as brewing microbes.

Such new-protein technologies are the leading threat to the global livestock industry, because they could be used to replace animal sources for everything from cheese and ice-cream to sausages, burgers, eggs, fish and steak, as well as creating a vast new range of foods we cannot yet imagine. Because the protein content is so high and the range of microbes so great, some of these foods could be produced with less processing than the animal-based products they compete with. Unhealthy components such as saturated fats can be excluded, and healthy ones, such as long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, can be bred in.

Last spring Solar Foods, the company in whose lab I first ate a pancake made from bacterial protein, opened its first factory, near Helsinki. The transition to such new-protein sources could be as profound in its impacts as the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture. If done right, it could massively reduce demand for land and farm chemicals.

Unlike farming, it could ensure that neither inputs (such as fertiliser) nor outputs (such as manure) leak into ecosystems. It could greatly reduce demand for fresh water: indeed, some microbes can be grown in saltwater. It could allow food to be produced in places that can no longer feed their people, as there is insufficient fertile land and rainfall. In doing so, as long as governments prevent large corporations from monopolising the new technologies, it could greatly enhance food security and food sovereignty.

If you doubt the potential of these technologies, you have only to look at the effort deployed by meat corporations and their tame politicians to shut them down. At the behest of livestock lobby groups, lab-grown meat has been banned in Florida, Alabama and Italy. Politicians in France, Romania, Hungary and other US states are seeking to follow suit.

Given the confusing terms used in these laws, legislators don’t appear to be entirely sure what they are banning. But some officials are trying to ensure that the entire new-protein sector is stopped in its tracks. An attempt by the EU to green the food supply by encouraging alternative proteins was crushed by the agriculture commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski.

Governments seeking to ban alternatives to animal products have scarcely sought to disguise their motivation: protectionism. Several politicians and officials have openly admitted that they’re trying to defend established industries – meat and dairy – against competition. In every other sector they claim to favour “free markets”, and protectionism attracts major penalties. In this sector, it is enforced by legislation.

Now, according to Greenpeace’s investigative outlet, Unearthed, a new campaign funded by the livestock industry and fronted by a former meat executive is pressing for an EU-wide ban. As the far-right Hungarian government has the presidency of the European Council, the campaign could succeed. The UK government’s support for new proteins is a very rare benefit of Brexit.

None of the US and EU moves are subtle. They’re the exercise of brute legacy power. They are reinforced by an outrageous allocation of public spending. Research published in the journal One Earth found that the US government spends 800 times more on subsidising animal products than on subsidising new proteins, and the EU spends 1,200 times.

A new investigation by Kenny Torrella for Vox magazine reports that, far from contesting this anti-environmental market rigging, some of the leading environment groups in the US – WWF, the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund – are participating in meat industry greenwashing campaigns. Why? The answer seems to be sheer cowardice: their justifications suggest they are terrified of upsetting livestock farmers. Greenpeace UK is highly unusual in seeking to defend the new technologies against the old ones.

We should recognise self-serving corporate propaganda when we see it, confront protectionism and neophobia, and support the technologies that could be our last, best hope of averting environmental catastrophe.

Right now, you could massively reduce your impact on our planet by giving up meat.  Start today.

Things we can change

 

Waxworm saliva rapidly breaks down plastic

From The Guardian

Enzymes that rapidly break down plastic bags have been discovered in the saliva of wax worms, which are moth larvae that infest beehives.

The enzymes are the first reported to break down polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could lead to cost-effective ways of recycling the plastic.

The discovery came after one scientist, an amateur beekeeper, cleaned out an infested hive and found the larvae started eating holes in a plastic refuse bag. The researchers said the study showed insect saliva may be “a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise [the cleanup of polluting waste]”.

Polyethylene makes up 30% of all plastic production and is used in bags and other packaging that make up a significant part of worldwide plastic pollution. The only recycling at scale today uses mechanical processes and creates lower-value products.

Chemical breakdown could create valuable chemicals or, with some further processing, new plastic, thereby avoiding the need for new virgin plastic made from oil. The enzymes can be easily synthesised and overcome a bottleneck in plastic degradation, the researchers said, which is the initial breaking of the polymer chains. That usually requires a lot of heating, but the enzymes work at normal temperatures, in water and at neutral pH.

“My beehives were plagued with wax worms, so I started cleaning them, putting the worms in a plastic bag,” said Dr Federica Bertocchini, at the Biological Research Centre in Madrid. “After a while, I noticed lots of holes and we found it wasn’t only chewing, it was [chemical breakdown], so that was the beginning of the story.”

In terms of commercial application, it is early days, the researchers say. “We need to do a lot of research and think about how to develop this new strategy to deal with plastic waste,” said Dr Clemente Arias, also at the Spanish research centre. As well as large recycling plants, the scientists said it might one day be possible to have kits in homes to recycle plastic bags into useful products. Other scientists are currently investigating beetles and butterfly larvae for their plastic-eating potential.

Previous discoveries of useful enzymes have been in microbes, with a 2021 study indicating that bacteria in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic. It found 30,000 different enzymes that might degrade 10 different types of plastic.

A super-enzyme that quickly breaks down plastic drink bottles, usually made from PET plastic, was revealed in 2020, inspired by a bug found in a waste dump in Japan and accidentally tweaked to increase its potency. An enzyme that breaks down PET has also been produced from bacteria in leaf compost, while another bug from a waste dump can eat polyurethane, a plastic that is widely used but rarely recycled.

Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped every year, and the pollution pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste, and full recycling could cut new plastic production.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, identified 200 proteins in the wax worm saliva and narrowed down the two that had the plastic-eating effect. “This study suggests insect saliva might [be] a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise the bioremediation field,” the researchers said.

Wax worm larvae live and grow in the honeycombs of beehives and feed on beeswax, which may be why they have evolved the enzymes. Another possibility is the enzymes break down the toxic chemicals produced by plants as a defence and which are similar to some additives in plastics.

Prof Andy Pickford, the director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the UK’s University of Portsmouth, said the discovery of the enzymes in wax worm saliva was exciting. “The reaction happens within a few hours at room temperature suggesting that enzymatic breakdown may be a route to making use of polyethylene waste.”

Microplastics and health

From New Atlas

Plastic pollution is a grave and growing concern, but the biggest problems that it poses may just come from its smallest forms. Tiny fragments of the stuff are now strewn across the entire globe and are beginning to show up in different parts of the human body. But what are the health risks associated with ingesting and inhaling this now omnipresent synthetic material?

Microplastics are smaller pieces of plastic measuring less than 5 mm in size (0.2 in), and can wash into the environment in ready-made form, such as the microbeads used in cosmetic products or the tiny fibers used in synthetic textiles. Alternatively, microplastics can come via the breakdown of larger plastic products in the environment, such as plastic bags or soda bottles that are weathered and corroded by forces like UV light and ocean currents.

In recent years, scientists have intensified their focus on the behavior of microplastics, exposing the many ways they move through the environment. This has led to a string of important discoveries as groundbreaking as they are concerning, showing that plastics can be driven into the deep ocean, spread through the air with the wind, drift back to Earth with snowfall in the Arctic and Antarctic, and even turn up near the summit of Mount Everest. Further, we know that disposable coffee cups release trillions of plastic particles into their liquid, and that plastic bottles can shed particles and chemicals into drinking water during use.

Meanwhile, scientists have also dialed up their efforts to understand the presence of microplastics in the human body. This includes a 2018 study that found microplastics in human stool samples all around the world, and a 2020 study that unearthed plastic particles in every human tissue it sampled. More recently, significant discoveries have shown for the first time that microplastics can exist in living lung tissue, and also that they can enter the bloodstream.

"We already knew that microplastic is present in excrements of humans, but it is toxicologically relevant to check what might be circulating in the human blood," Heather Leslie, lead author of that study, explained to New Atlas. "We went from expecting there to be microplastic in human blood to knowing it is there. It’s the first real-world evidence plastic particles are actually absorbed in the human bloodstream."

Knowing that the plastics are there is one thing, understanding the threat that they pose to our health and that of other living organisms is very much another. Given the mounting concentration of plastic in the oceans, the potential impacts on marine species seem like a good place to start, and a solid body of evidence is building around this which paints a disconcerting picture.

Studies have shown that microplastic exposure can cause aneurysms and reproductive changes in fish, impair cognitive function in hermit crabs, lead to swimming abnormalities in shrimp and weaken the grip of mussels and potentially hamper their growth. We've also seen efforts to extrapolate these kinds of findings to humans through studies that use the genetically similar fruit fly as a model, which showed that microplastics can alter gene expression associated with stress response and oxidative damage.

"Much of what we know about microplastics has come from the marine environment research and it is only more recently that human impacts have come under scrutiny," Jeanette Rotchell, principal investigator of microplastic impacts on human health at the University of Hull, told New Atlas.

Last December, scientists published research investigating the toxic effects of microplastic exposure on human cells. The first study of its kind, it built on previous work in this area such as research demonstrating that microplastics have the ability to alter the shape of human lung cells. This involved a systematic review of the available literature on the impacts of microplastics in lab-based exposure studies.

Among the toxic effects the team considered were cell death, impacts on the cell membranes, oxidative stress and characteristics akin to allergic reactions. The research showed, according to lead author Evangelos Danopoulos, that we are ingesting microplastics at "levels consistent with harmful effects on cells, which are in many cases the initiating event for health effects."

While research into the potential toxicity of plastic particles themselves is still in its early stages, the chemicals they contain are known to carry possible problems of their own. An example of these are the plasticizers that are added to plastics to make them durable and flexible, with BPA perhaps the most famous example. Chemicals of this nature are linked to a range of adverse health effects in humans, with alarming damage to brain cells and elevated cholesterol and heart disease risk among the more recent findings.

"At the moment we know more about the toxicity of chemical additives that leach out of plastic materials," Leslie told us. "Microplastic might be toxic because of these additives or because of the particle getting caught up in biological processes, or a combination of the two."

Pollutants linked to falling sperm quality

There had been an alarming decline in sperm counts and concentration in western countries over decades, the scientists said. Photograph: The Science Picture Company/Alamy

Global heating isn't the only environmental disaster we're facing.

From The Guardian

A cocktail of chemical pollutants measured in people’s bodies has been linked to falling semen quality by new research.

Chemicals such as bisphenols and dioxins are thought to interfere with hormones and damage sperm quality, and the study found combinations of these compounds are present at “astonishing” levels, up to 100 times those considered safe.


Bisphenol A (BPA) was responsible for the highest risks, the scientists said. The chemical is found in milk and tinned food as it leaches from the linings of the packaging. The key steps for healthy male sexual development occur during pregnancy, making the study results particularly relevant for expectant mothers, the researchers said.

Sperm counts and concentration had undergone an alarming decline in western countries for decades, the scientists said, with sperm counts halving in the last 40 years. Other male sexual disorders such as penis malformation, breast cancer and undescended testes have been increasing. Hormone-disrupting chemicals are a prime suspect and the study sheds new light on the potential for chemical cocktails to cause harm.

The study team, led by Prof Andreas Kortenkamp, at Brunel University London, said they “were astonished by the magnitude of the hazard index”, the measure of risk from the chemical cocktails. The team were also surprised that BPA was the most worrying chemical, as previous work had focused on phthalates, which are used in plastics.

Kortenkamp told the Guardian the research would allow better epidemiological studies to be done in people to assess the impacts. “But personally I think, with the evidence we’ve produced, there’s no reason to delay any regulatory action.”

The research, published in the journal Environment International, assessed measurements of nine chemicals, including bisphenol, phthalates and paracetamol (known in some countries as acetaminophen), in urine samples from almost 100 Danish men aged 18 to 30. It also used existing data, mostly from the European Food Standards Agency, to estimate people’s exposures to 20 other chemicals.

This data was compared with acceptable levels of exposure, also derived from the scientific literature. This gave a measure of the potential impact of each chemical, which were then added together using an established method to produce an overall risk measure for the cocktail of chemicals in each of the men.

All the men were exposed to unsafe combined exposures and the most exposed in the study had levels 100 times greater than the acceptable values, with the average being 17 times. “Our assessment reveals alarming exceedances of acceptable combined exposures,” the researchers concluded.

The researchers were also able to rank the chemicals, with BPA being the biggest driver of risk, followed by dioxins, paracetamol and phthalates. However, removing BPA did not bring down the combined exposure to acceptable levels.

Paracetamol has been shown to cause a decline in sperm quality in laboratory animals and increase risk of non-descending testes in boys born to mothers using the painkiller during pregnancy. In 2021, a review backed by 90 scientists said: “We recommend that pregnant women should be cautioned at the beginning of pregnancy to forgo [paracetamol] unless its use is medically indicated, and consult with a physician or pharmacist if they are uncertain.”

 

Microplastics in freshly fallen Antarctic snow

 From The Guardian

Research published in The Cryosphere journal identified microplastics in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica for the first time. Photograph: Alex Aves

Microplastics have been found in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica for the first time, which could accelerate snow and ice melting and pose a threat to the health of the continent’s unique ecosystems.

The tiny plastics – smaller than a grain of rice - have previously been found in Antarctic sea ice and surface water but this is the first time it has been reported in fresh snowfall, the researchers say.

The research, conducted by University of Canterbury PhD student, Alex Aves, and supervised by Dr Laura Revell has been published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere.

Aves collected snow samples from the Ross Ice Shelf in late 2019 to determine whether microplastics had been transferred from the atmosphere into the snow. Up until then, there had been few studies on this in Antarctica.

“We were optimistic that she wouldn’t find any microplastics in such a pristine and remote location,” Revell said. She instructed Aves to also collect samples from Scott Base and the McMurdo Station roadways – where microplastics had previously been detected - so “she’d have at least some microplastics to study,” Revell said.

But that was an unnecessary precaution – plastic particles were found in every one of the 19 samples from the Ross Ice Shelf.

“It’s incredibly sad but finding microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow highlights the extent of plastic pollution into even the most remote regions of the world,” Aves said.

Plastic pollution has been found from the summit of Mount Everest to the depths of the oceans. People are known to inadvertently eat and breathe microplastics and another recent study found that the particles cause damage to human cells. A study last year found that airborne microplastics are “spiraling around the globe”.

Aves found an average of 29 microplastic particles per litre of melted snow, which is higher than marine concentrations reported previously from the surrounding Ross Sea and in Antarctic sea ice.

Samples taken from immediately next to the scientific bases on Ross Island, Scott Base and McMurdo Station threw up larger concentrations – nearly three times that of remote areas.

There were 13 different types of plastic found, with the most common being PET – the plastic commonly used to make soft drink bottles and clothing.

Atmospheric modelling suggested they may have travelled thousands of kilometres through the air, however it is equally likely the presence of humans in Antarctica has established a microplastic ‘footprint’, Revell said.

“There was a photo we found of some marker flags that are put out for use for wayfinding around the base…those colors matched the most commonly colored microplastics that we found in the environment.”

Revell’s prior research has shown that microplastics in the atmosphere can trap radiation emitted by the Earth and contribute to climate change. Dark microplastics in icy surfaces could absorb sunlight and lead to localised warming, she said. The plastics can also be toxic for animals and plant life.

“We’re still learning a lot about the impacts, but from what we know so far, it’s not very good.”

Pollution caused 1 in 6 deaths over last 5 years

 From The Washington Post

Deaths from fossil fuel burning and lead poisoning have risen by 66 percent in the past two decades

In 2015, 1 in 6 deaths worldwide stemmed from poor air quality, unsafe water and toxic chemical pollution. That deadly toll — 9 million people each year — has continued unabated through 2019, killing more people than war, terrorism, road injuries, malaria, drugs and alcohol.

The new findings, released Tuesday by the Lancet Planetary Health journal, shows that pollution continues to be the world’s largest environmental health threat for disease and premature deaths, with more the 90 percent of these deaths taking place in low- and middle-income countries.

Richard Fuller, the report’s lead author, said in an interview that “a lack of attention” accounts for why this grim tally continues unabated.

“There’s not much of an outcry around pollution … even though, clearly, 9 million people dying a year is an enormous issue to be concerned about,” he said.

The analysis, which used 2019 data from Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors, found that air pollution accounts for the vast majority of premature deaths, at 6.7 million. Water pollution accounted for 1.4 million deaths, while lead poisoning took close to a million lives. The report is an update of a similar analysis done by Fuller and his colleagues in 2015, which also found air and water pollution as the top offenders.

While the total number of pollution-related deaths has not changed in the past five years, the sources have shifted in some regions. In the past, most pollution deaths stemmed from indoor and household air pollution, caused by fine particles of soot released from indoor stoves burning wood or dung. Unclean water and untreated sewage also took more than a million lives.

Fuller said this source of pollution has decreased in recent years, as many households in China and India have switched to gas for cooking.

But that was about the only good news in the report. Instead of those traditional pollutants, fossil fuel burning, automobile combustion and toxic chemical pollution now pose a greater health risk in the developing world.

More than half of the countries and nations worldwide experienced more deaths from outdoor air pollution and toxic chemicals in 2019 than indoor air pollution and water contamination. More than 2 million people died from industrial and chemical pollution in China, for example, compared with about 367,000 from traditional sources.

In Africa, traditional pollutants still rank as the main cause of pollution-related disease and death, although industrial pollution is on the rise.

“When we’re seeing this increase in industrialization, we’re seeing increased urbanization, more people living in cities, and an aging population who are more vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution,” said Neelu Tummala, a physician and co-director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University who was not involved in the study. “All of this sort of combined together just really increases the amount of associated mortality.”

A boy disposes of raw sewage into a stream in the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi on Aug. 26, 2011. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

The ocean's inhabitants

 A cartoon by Gatis Sluka