Fish Farm in Saronic Gulf. (Photo: Artur Rydzewski / Flickr)
The world is farming more seafood than it catches. Is that a good thing?
Originally published: Grist on June 14, 2024 by Frida Garza (more by Grist) | (Posted Jun 26, 2024)
Agriculture, Ecology, Environment, StrategyGlobalNewswireFish, United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
A new report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, has found that more fish were farmed worldwide in 2022 than harvested from the wild, an apparent first.
Last week, the FAO released its annual report on the state of aquaculture–which refers to the farming of both seafood and aquatic plants–and fisheries around the world. The organization found that global production from both aquaculture and fisheries reached a new high–223.3 million metric tons of animals and plants–in 2022. Of that, 185.4 million metric tons were aquatic animals, and 37.8 million metric tons were algae. Aquaculture was responsible for 51 percent of aquatic animal production in 2022, or 94.4 metric tons.
The milestone was in many ways an expected one, given the world’s insatiable appetite for seafood. Since 1961, consumption of seafood has grown at twice the annual rate of the global population, according to the FAO. Because production levels from fisheries are not expected to change significantly in the future, meeting the growing global demand for seafood almost certainly necessitates an increase in aquaculture.
Though fishery production levels fluctuate from year to year, “it’s not like there’s new fisheries out there waiting to be discovered,” said Dave Martin, program director for Sustainable Fisheries Partnerships, an international organization that works to reduce the environmental impact of seafood supply chains.
So any growth in consumption of seafood is going to come from aquaculture.
But the rise of aquaculture underscores the need to transform seafood systems to minimize their impact on the planet. Both aquaculture and fisheries–sometimes referred to as capture fisheries, as they involve the capture of wild seafood–come with significant environmental and climate considerations. What’s more, the two systems often depend on each other, making it difficult to isolate their climate impacts.
“There’s a lot of overlap between fisheries and aquaculture that the average consumer may not see,” said Dave Love, a research professor at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.
Studies have shown that the best diet for the planet is one free of animal protein. Still, seafood generally has much lower greenhouse gas emissions than other forms of protein from land-based animals. And given many people’s unwillingness or inability to go vegan, the FAO recommends transforming, adapting, and expanding sustainable seafood production to feed the world’s growing population and improve food security.
But “there’s a lot of ways to do aquaculture well, and there’s a lot of ways to do it poorly,” said Martin. Aquaculture can result in nitrogen and phosphorus being released into the natural environment, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Farmed fish can also spread disease to wild populations, or escape from their confines and breed with other species, resulting in genetic pollution that can disrupt the fitness of a wild population. Martin points to the diesel fuel used to power equipment on certain fish farms as a major source of aquaculture’s environmental impact. According to an analysis from the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, swapping out fossil fuel-based generators on fish farms for renewable-powered hybrids would prevent 500 million to 780 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2050.
Other areas for improvement will vary depending on the specific species being farmed. In 2012, a U.N. study found that mangrove forests–a major carbon sink–have suffered greatly due to the development of shrimp and fish farming. Today, industry stakeholders have been exploring how new approaches and techniques from shrimp farmers can help restore mangroves.
Meanwhile, wild fishing operations present their own environmental problems. For example, poorly managed fisheries can harvest fish more quickly than wild populations can breed, a phenomenon known as overfishing. Certain destructive wild fishing techniques also kill a lot of non-targeted species, known as bycatch, threatening marine biodiversity.
But the line between aquaculture and fish harvested from the wild isn’t as clear as it may seem. For example, pink salmon that are raised in hatcheries and then released into the wild to feed, mature, and ultimately be caught again are often marketed as “wild caught.” Lobsters, caught wild in Maine, are often fed bait by fisherman to help them put on weight. “It’s a wild fishery,” said Love–but the lobster fishermen’s practice of fattening up their catch shows how human intervention is present even in wild-caught operations.
On the flipside, in a majority of aquaculture systems, farmers provide their fish with feed. That feed sometimes includes fish meal, says Love, a powder that comes from two sources: seafood processing waste (think: fish guts and tails) and wild-caught fish.
All of this can result in a confusing landscape for climate- or environmentally-conscientious consumers who eat fish. But Love recommends a few ways in which consumers can navigate choice when shopping for seafood. Buying fresh fish locally helps shorten supply chains, which can lower the carbon impact of eating aquatic animals. “In our work, we’ve found that the big impact from transport is shipping fresh seafood internationally by air,” he said. Most farmed salmon, for example, sold in the U.S. is flown in.
From both a climate and a nutritional standpoint, smaller fish and sea vegetables are also both good options. “Mussels, clams, oysters, seaweed–they’re all loaded with macronutrients and minerals in different ways” compared to fin fish, said Love.
https://mronline.org/2024/06/26/the-wor ... t-catches/
Rich nation hypocrisy accelerating global heating
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram (Posted Jun 24, 2024)
Originally published: Inter Press Service on April 24, 2024 (more by Inter Press Service) |
Rich nations’ climate hypocrisy is accelerating global heating, pushing the planet closer to irreversible catastrophe, with its worst consequences borne by the poorest, both countries and peoples.
Climate injustice
While official and other discourses acknowledge or even invoke the need for collective responsibility, the disparity in culpability between wealthy nations and the developing world is stark.
Historically, the industrialized nations of the global North have been the primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions but continue to evade their fair share of responsibility.
The narrative of an equally shared burden of combating climate change conveniently obscures disproportionately greater emissions and historical exploitation by rich countries.
The European Union’s ambitious new ‘equitable’ climate policies, such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), continue this hypocrisy. While ostensibly aimed at reducing emissions, such measures burden developing countries more, further deepening world inequalities.
Market solutions best?
Similarly, carbon taxes, prices and emissions trading systems make it much harder for nations with fewer resources to afford adequate climate action. They have few resources to adapt to global heating and its effects, let alone afford the costly transitions to cleaner technologies and other mitigation measures.
Furthermore, developed nations have relocated energy-intensive industries to the global South to ‘export emissions’. Thus, they effectively shift blame while consuming most goods and services produced at high environmental costs.
Limiting the average temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C (degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, as agreed to by the UNFCCC, will require drastic reduction of carbon (dioxide equivalent) emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030!
Instead, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates current trends will increase the average temperature by 2.7°C by 2100, far above catastrophic levels.
Despite the urgency, countries are mainly focused on committing to the distracting ‘net-zero’ carbon emissions by 2050, ignoring the urgent need for substantial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cuts.
At recent climate conferences, carbon pricing and related market mechanisms have been ‘sold’ as an effective and fair means to rapidly reduce carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions to mitigate climate change.
Carbon tax revenue distribution
Worse, there is no discussion of how revenues from carbon taxation should be distributed equitably to accelerate climate adaptation and mitigation efforts in poorer countries.
Carbon pricing claims to penalise GHG emitters for the economic damages and losses caused by global warming. However, there is little evidence of efforts to compensate those most adversely affected.
Moreover, carbon market schemes have only made grossly inadequate impacts. Emissions have only been marginally reduced, well short of what the world needs to address the climate threat.
Besides being ineffective, only a tiny fraction of global GHG emissions are subject to carbon taxes, often imposed using biased methods and assumptions.
Carbon price discounts
Carbon prices have also been grossly discounted to induce market participation and public acceptability. Hence, carbon tax rates do not reflect the supposed social costs of adverse externalities.
Worse, despite the potential of carbon taxes to generate significant revenue for climate finance, progressive redistributive measures have not been developed, let alone implemented.
Hence, carbon pricing policies are not up to the task. They also fail to address underlying systemic issues driving global heating. Carbon taxes tend to be regressive, disproportionately burdening low-income individuals and countries.
Without a progressive reallocation of resources, poor nations and people cannot afford to adapt to global heating, let alone contribute to needed worldwide climate action efforts or achieve sustainable development.
Government fossil fuel subsidies, e.g., to ensure support against Russia after its Ukraine invitation, have undermined the purpose of carbon pricing. With such subsidies, carbon prices became negative in many countries in 2022.
Zero for ‘net-zero’
Carbon offset markets, touted as a way to achieve net-zero emissions, have been criticised as an ineffective distraction, allowing the wealthy to continue emitting GHGs while profiting financial intermediaries.
While successfully touted as a rallying slogan for climate action, the net-zero emissions target is dangerously misleading. Commitments to achieve net-zero emissions typically rely on ‘offsetting’, which allows countries and companies to avoid reducing emissions.
Despite earlier surges in demand for carbon offsets from major financial investors, much of the profit goes to arbitrage, speculation, and trading rather than decarbonisation efforts.
Initiatives like the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero were touted as significant breakthroughs. However, there is much reason to be sceptical about the effectiveness of such initiatives for reducing GHG emissions.
Less than half a year after the Glasgow Conference of Parties (COP), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and allied countries abandoned their declared commitment to end burning coal despite all its additional dangers, such as sulphide and sulphate emissions.
Market solutions or delusions?
While carbon pricing and offset markets have been promoted as solutions to mitigate global warming, their limitations and ineffectiveness in significantly reducing emissions underscore the need for alternative strategies.
Selective investment and technology promotion policies and greatly increased climate finance for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries are crucial.
They can only succeed if pragmatically conceived and implemented, considering the range of sustainable development and other challenges faced.
Addressing climate change requires a comprehensive, equitable, and pragmatic approach that prioritizes substantial emissions reductions and supports vulnerable populations most affected by global heating.
https://mronline.org/2024/06/24/rich-na ... l-heating/
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How Recycling Has Become a Largely Empty Gesture
Posted on June 22, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This article describes how the good intentions of the push for more recycling have gone awry. The causes are many, but particularly prominent are lack of clear guidance to consumers on what is worth recycling and poor consumer and trash hauler compliance. People in my old building would regularly put general garbage in the recycling bins. Of course, they may have heard the probably accurate rumor that the contents of the recycling containers were tossed in with the garbage when the Sanitation Department trucks arrived.
This piece shows how the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.
By Kate Yoder. Originally published at Grist; cross posted from Yale Climate Connections
T’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 bySamantha 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 2019said 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.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... sture.html
As with fish, the rot starts at the top. If it is not made it cannot be a problem.
The U.S. Is Nowhere Near Ready for Climate Change
Posted on June 26, 2024 by Yves Smith
Yves here. This post describes the two main elements of climate change danger to communities, which are flooding/sea level rises and severe storms. We are now seeing a third threat come into focus: the health effects of exposure to extreme heat and the open question of whether current infrastructure can remedy it adequately.
I am mystified as to why more world cities facing flood and sea rise risks have not hired the Dutch to figure out how to protect them. And ideas like managed retreat are, as far as I can tell, absent from mainstream policy discussions.
By Jeff Masters, Ph.D., a hurricane scientist with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 1986-1990. In 1995, he co-founded the Weather Underground, and served as its chief meteorologist and on its Board of Directors until it was sold to the Weather Company in 2012. Between 2005-2019, his Category 6 blog was one of the Internet’s most popular and widely quoted sources of extreme weather and climate change information. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections
Debris from a collapsed house in Rodanthe, North Carolina, in the Outer Banks, on May 10, 2022. (Photo credit: Cape Hatteras National Seashore / public domain)
Consider this parable from not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away:
The Kingdom of Nacirema has been engaged in a long and bloody conflict with an age-old foe, and the war has been going badly of late. More and more soldiers suffering from serious wounds and internal bleeding have been arriving at the hospital. But instead of being admitted to the hospital and receiving the operation needed to stem the bleeding — a painful and expensive procedure — the soldiers have been merely receiving blood transfusions and sent back to the front lines with a dose of painkillers.
Well, this is not working out so great, because the enemy is now using more dangerous weapons, which have been sold to them by the Kingdom of Nacirema’s powerful and corrupt corporations. Now even more soldiers are arriving at the hospital with more grievous wounds, requiring ever-larger blood transfusions. The supply of blood is running low, forcing the kingdom to make some tough choices. Because the soldiers’ wounds are now much more serious, not enough blood is available for the transfusions to save all of them. Which soldiers do they save — and which do they let die?
An Honest Conversation on Climate Change Triage Is Needed
The above story is an allegorical one about the U.S. approach to the new and worsening reality of climate extremes. Despite some recent progress (described in part one of this series), government programs to bolster public infrastructure and move people out of flood zones are drastically underfunded. As a result, when disaster strikes in the form of a major flood, hurricane, or the like, we merely give the equivalent of a blood transfusion to the injured, without stopping the bleeding.
The situation has now reached the point where the government can’t possibly make whole all those wiped out by a disaster, let alone buy out all of the properties that have flooded repeatedly or finance all the beach nourishment projects that could defend coastal property against sea level rise and stronger storms.
For example, the U.S. Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, meant to help state and local governments better prepare for future disasters, is hugely oversubscribed, despite a recent addition of more funds. And though voluntary home buyouts have helped tens of thousands of families move out of flood-prone homes, millions more remain at risk.
Without a realistic managed-retreat policy, chaotic unmanaged retreat from the coasts and flood plains is more likely to occur, resulting in much greater harm to all affected — and to the economy.
Adapting to Climate Change Will Be Expensive — But Not as Expensive as Doing Nothing
The scope of the problem is vast.
As sea levels rise, $400 billion will be needed by 2040 to build sea walls to protect U.S. communities against floods expected to occur once per year, according to a 2019 study by the Center for Climate Integrity, which used a moderate sea level rise scenario.
The move of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, an example of successful managed retreat. When completed in 1870, the lighthouse in North Carolina’s Outer Banks had been located a safe 1,500 feet inland from the ocean, but natural barrier island erosion processes, augmented by rising seas and storm-driven tides, had reduced this distance to just 120 feet by 1999. That year, the lighthouse was moved 1,500 feet back from the shoreline at a cost of $12 million. Locals were strongly opposed to the move, believing it would harm the tourist industry. Ironically, the lighthouse is now more of a tourist attraction than ever. The regional slope of the land is one to 10,000, which means that a one-foot rise in sea level could move the shoreline about two miles. Thus, the lighthouse will likely have to be moved again later this century. (Image credit: National Park Service)
Other costs of preparing for sea level rise — including elevating buildings, hardening utilities, telecommunications, transportation systems, and water and sewage infrastructure, plus health care, community preparedness, and environmental protection and remediation, could be five to 10 times higher, or $2-4 trillion. Measures to protect communities from more infrequent floods, such as the one-in-100-year floods that are occurring with increasing regularity, could incur additional costs.
You can add to that bill the $104 billion needed to refurbish the nation’s dams, plus the tens of billions needed to upgrade our levees. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021 allocated some $50 billion over five years for climate change resiliency, but a 2021 recommendation from the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that over $2.5 trillion in unfunded infrastructure upgrades are needed by 2029 in order to attain “B” grades, meaning the infrastructure is safe and reliable.
Money needed by 2029 to achieve a “B” grade for U.S. infrastructure. (Image credit: American Society of Civil Engineers 2021 Infrastructure Report Card)
Many infrastructure upgrades aren’t taking future climate extremes into account.
As sea level rise expert Robert Young of Coastal Carolina University wrote in a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “most of the funded projects are designed to protect existing infrastructure, in most cases with no demands for the recipients to improve long-term planning for disasters or to change patterns of future flood plain development. At the very least, we need to demand that communities accepting public funds for rebuilding or resilience stop putting new infrastructure in harm’s way.”
Just 3-10% of all money spent in the U.S. on climate-related projects is spent on adaptation; the vast majority of this financing comes from the public sector, according to climate adaptation expert Susan Crawford of Harvard. Most of the money spent on climate change — for example, in the landmark Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — is earmarked for reducing climate pollution. Crawford advocates prioritizing adaptation spending, since every $1 invested in adaptation could yield up to $10 in net economic benefits, according to a 2021 report from the Global Commission on Adaptation.
At the same time, more Americans are moving into risky places. The U.S. population living along the coast at an elevation of 10 meters (33 feet) or lower is expected to grow to 44 million by 2060.
“Discouraging this risky new development will avoid much larger costs of relocating these people and the supporting infrastructure at a future date,” the Coastal Flood Resilience Project writes.
Resistance to Retreat
At the moment, taxpayers are subsidizing rebuilding properties in known hazard areas multiple times.
The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program paid out nearly $9 billion to so-called repetitive-loss properties between 1978 and 2012 — nearly 25% of total payments, according to the book “Extreme Cities,” by Ashley Dawson. These payouts were skewed heavily toward rich people.
A managed retreat from risky places, accompanied by the building of new, dense construction in the right places, could reduce taxpayer costs and prepare Americans for the coming climate extremes.
But there is little appetite or incentive for politicians to embrace this solution. For example, cities rely on the municipal bond market to fund city services. But any attempt to implement a managed retreat program from risky areas could hurt their credit rating, because a shrinking population is one less able to repay its debt.
“It is rational for city officials to delay any real effort to move people out of harm’s way, or even to suggest that such a step may ever be necessary,” Crawford wrote.
In his 2024 essay, “The Insurance Apocalypse Conversation America Won’t Have,” journalist Hamilton Nolan is blunt about “how far we are from a genuine public discourse on this topic. We are still mired in the ‘Everything is fine!’ phase, where nervous, sweating politicians with pasted-on smiles beckon you into their doomed states while silently praying that the collapse doesn’t come while they’re still in office.”
Voluntary home buyouts have helped about 45,000 families move out of flood-prone homes over the past 30 years, but this represents a tiny fraction of the millions at risk and is fewer than the number of homes experiencing repeat flood damage and the number of new homes built in flood plains. In her 2023 book, “Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm,” Crawford of Harvard includes a detailed analysis of the problem, arguing that federal leadership and funding are needed to properly manage retreat from coastal regions:
If FEMA’s buyouts continue at their current pace, they’ll be able to get to about 130,000 more houses over the next 90 years. But there are something like thirteen million Americans in coastal areas who will need buyouts by 2051. FEMA’s current buyout program does not offer any help to people in public housing or renters. What’s needed is a region-wide strategic withdrawal program assisted by coordinated governments at all levels, not a series of one-off buyouts.
Do the math: Only 1% of the needed buyouts may happen under the current system — which also happens to be a cumbersome and unfair process. Buyouts usually take two to five years to finish, and FEMA disproportionately funds buyouts of vulnerable properties in White communities compared to communities of color, since money is allocated based on a cost-benefit analysis that prioritizes more expensive properties. Wealthier communities may also have more resources to influence decision-makers who decide who gets a buyout.
Without a realistic managed-retreat policy, chaotic unmanaged retreat is likely to occur, with plenty of legal challenges, resulting in much greater harm to all affected — and to the economy. As Duke University sea level rise expert Orrin Pilkey and co-authors wrote in their 2016 book, “Retreat From a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change“:
Like it or not, we will retreat from most of the world’s non-urban shorelines in the not very distant future. Our retreat options can be characterized as either difficult or catastrophic. We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.
In their thought-provoking 2021 essay, America’s Next Great Migrations Are Driven by Climate Change, Parag Khanna and Susan Joy Hassol write:
In the 21st century, we must shift from coastal to inland, from low to high elevation, and from resource-depleted to resource-rich areas — and we must do so sustainably, for our next habitat may well be our last chance to coexist with nature before there is nothing left to sustain us. To re-sort ourselves according to better latitude and altitude is not to “retreat” but to embrace the future guided by tools that identify topographies better suited for human habitation.
What We Need: Adaptation That’s Transformative, Not Just Incremental
The 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment, the government’s preeminent report on climate change, recognized the inadequacy of our climate adaptation efforts, saying: “The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States … current adaptation efforts and investments areinsufficient to reduce today’s climate-related risks.” The report called for “transformative adaptation,” giving as examples:
Directing new housing development to less flood-prone areas
Revitalization of rivers and relocation of human activities in flood plains (as opposed to building channels and dikes)
The shift from fossil fuels toward clean energy production
Creation of multi-stakeholders’ committees for managing water use quotas during scarcity (compared to top-down decisions)
In contrast, much of current U.S. climate adaptation efforts are examples of “incremental adaptation, such as spending money to elevate homes above floodwaters. For example, the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included funds to elevate 19 single-family homes in the Florida Keys.
I love the Keys, but cruel math says that it is not cost-effective to defend the low-lying islands, which are all but certain to be swamped by rising seas in the coming decades. A state-commissioned 2020 report by the Urban Land Institute found that spending about $8 billion to combat sea level rise and storm surges in the Keys would only prevent about $3 billion in damages over the period 2020-2070 — a return of just 41 cents on each dollar spent. In contrast, the study found that in Miami, a similar investment would yield a return of over $9 for each dollar spent.
The 2022 IPCC report affirmed the idea that difficult trade-offs are in store: “Only avoidance and relocation can remove coastal risks for the coming decades, while other measures only delay impacts for a time, have increasing residual risk or perpetuate risk and create ongoing legacy effects and virtually certain property and ecosystem losses.”
The U.S. has a long history of successful managed retreat and community relocation efforts that we can learn from, climate scientist Nicholas Pinter discusses in a 2021 essay, True Stories of Managed Retreat From Rising Waters. He acknowledges, though, that the lessons learned from relocating relatively small communities in recent years (above) will be difficult to scale up by several orders of magnitude.
A Vision for the Right Way to do Managed Retreat
As Crawford writes, “This is the American approach in a nutshell: Here’s data. Here are a set of perverse incentives — growth above all, dependence on property tax receipts, perceived need to encourage people to live in risky areas by selling them flood insurance — and broken, patchwork, scattershot legal authorities and programs that make scaled-up, thoughtful relocation just about impossible.”
But U.S. climate adaptation efforts could be significantly reformed with the passage of the bipartisan National Coordination on Adaptation and Resilience for Security Act of 2023, which would create the organizational structure needed to move forward and appoint a chief resilience officer appointed by the president to coordinate climate adaptation efforts. Perhaps the chief resilience officer could take some advice from Crawford’s 2023 book, which has the best proposal I’ve seen on how we should be handling managed retreat from sea level rise:
Imagine gradually making it more expensive to live in dangerous places while simultaneously providing time-limited incentives and subsidies supporting moving away — a multidecade plan, for example, to gradually phase out the mortgages on properties that will be eventually returned to nature, and to subsidize future rent payments if made in higher, drier places. Imagine planning for a multidecade, gradual move, in consultation with each community, to new and welcoming locations well-connected to transit and jobs. Imagine caring for the least well-off among us, ensuring that they have a voice in this planning and choices about whether, when, and how to leave, while firmly setting an endpoint on human habitation in the riskiest places, or, at least, making it clear that these places will be repurposed for other uses. Without this kind of vision, the coming transition will be a cliff rather than a slope, casting millions into sudden misery. Governments at all levels need to understand that the riskiest response of all would be to do nothing, or to act only incrementally, in the face of already accelerating threats that may at any moment abruptly begin accelerating even more quickly, robbing us of our ability to plan. Would you get on an elevator if you knew there was a substantial chance of the cables holding the car snapping just before you reached your floor? Would you have your city’s residents collectively get on that elevator? I don’t think so.
Recommended Reading at link.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... hange.html
Managed retreat is the logical thing to do until it bumps up into capitalist logic. The owners of seafront property expect society at large to protect their equity, regardless of the futility. Again and again, the problem is capitalism.
care for the vulnerable
rise to 1.5°C
