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Just 9.5% of plastic made in 2022 used recycled material, study shows

Global research reveals most of 400m tonnes produced using fossil fuels, predominantly coal or oilLess than 10% of the plastic produced around the world is made from recycled material, according to the first detailed global analysis of its life cycle.The research reveals that most plastic is made from fossil fuels, predominantly coal and oil, despite rhetoric by producers, supermarkets and drinks companies about plastic being recycled. Continue reading...

Less than 10% of the plastic produced around the world is made from recycled material, according to the first detailed global analysis of its life cycle.The research reveals that most plastic is made from fossil fuels, predominantly coal and oil, despite rhetoric by producers, supermarkets and drinks companies about plastic being recycled.The research analysed the 400m tonnes of plastic produced in 2022 in order to support attempts to reduce pollution and promote sustainable plastic management.Plastic production has risen markedly since the 2m tonnes manufactured in 1950, and is projected to reach 800m tonnes a year by 2050. “As a result plastic pollution is a pressing and growing global issue, posing major challenges for the environment, economy, and public health,” the authors said.Quanyin Tan and colleagues analysed key trends in the global plastic supply chain. Of the 400m tonnes of plastic produced over the course of 2022, just under 38m tonnes (9.5%) was produced from recycled plastic, 98% of the remaining 362m tonnes was produced from fossil fuels, predominantly coal and oil.The research, published in Communications Earth & Environment, shows a significant increase in the amount of plastic being disposed of by incineration rather than recycling, with just 27.9% of plastic waste disposed of in 2022 actually being recycled.While China is the biggest producer and consumer of plastic, Americans consume the most plastic per head, the equivalent of 216kg per person a year. The US produces 40.1 megatonnes (Mt) of plastic waste – most of it from plastic packaging.The 28 countries of the EU and Japan also register high per capita plastic consumption, at 86.6kg and 129kg respectively.Globally, landfill remains the main destination of plastic waste, accounting for 103.37 Mt or 40%.Attempts continue to agree a global plastic waste treaty to tackle the environmental and public health scourge of plastic waste.Talks in Busan, South Korea, ended in failure last December after fossil fuel producing nations, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, resisted attempts to include production caps in the treaty.More than 100 countries supported a draft text that included legally binding global reductions in plastic production and the phasing out of certain chemicals and single-use plastic products.Talks are due to resume in Geneva in August.

‘Every year matters’: Queensland’s critically endangered ‘bum-breathing’ turtle battles the odds

Guardian Australia is highlighting the plight of our endangered native species during an election campaign that is ignoring broken environment laws and rapidly declining ecosystemsExplore the series – Last chance: the extinction crisis being ignored this electionGet Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an emailA rare “bum-breathing” turtle found in a single river system in Queensland has suffered one of its worst breeding seasons on record due to flooding last December. It has prompted volunteers to question how many more “bad years” the species can survive.A freshwater species that breathes by absorbing oxygen through gill-like structures in its tail, the Mary River turtle is endemic to south-east Queensland. Its population has fallen by more than 80% since the 1960s and its conservation status was upgraded from endangered to critically endangered last year.Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email Continue reading...

A rare “bum-breathing” turtle found in a single river system in Queensland has suffered one of its worst breeding seasons on record due to flooding last December. It has prompted volunteers to question how many more “bad years” the species can survive.A freshwater species that breathes by absorbing oxygen through gill-like structures in its tail, the Mary River turtle is endemic to south-east Queensland. Its population has fallen by more than 80% since the 1960s and its conservation status was upgraded from endangered to critically endangered last year.Volunteers have worked for more than two decades at Tiaro, about 200km north of Brisbane, to save the species. The Mary River typically flows low at the start of summer – about two metres depth. But when Guardian Australia visited in December it had surged above 10 metres after unusually heavy rain.Scientists consider the turtle one rung away from extinction. Illustration: Meeri AnneliThe result was the number of nests on the riverbanks – and the number of hatchlings that survived – was one of the lowest in the conservation program’s 24-year history. Seventeen nests, known as clutches, were laid during the season. Usually 30 to 40 are expected during the turtle’s breeding months of October, November and December.Eggs in nine clutches hatched successfully but eight were lost to flood waters. The head of the conservation effort and Tiaro Landcare project leader, Marilyn Connell, said the Mary River turtle already had “lots of things going against it, making it difficult to recover”.“You sort of can’t believe it,” she said. “We felt despondent.”‘How many of these bad years can a species that has already declined this much deal with?’ Photograph: Chris Van Wyk/ZSL/PAThe volunteers made the difficult decision to intervene and move two nests higher up the riverbanks. One of these survived the flood waters.The river eventually peaked at 11.5 metres at Tiaro in December, one of only six times it has been recorded at that height at that time of year in the past 100 years, according to Connell.The Mary River turtle’s formal listing of critically endangered means scientists consider it one rung away from extinction. The remaining wild population is estimated to be about 10,000. They face threats from foxes and other nest predators, invasive species and developments that disturb the flow of the river, including dams and weirs.“Every year matters, that’s how we feel,” Connell said. “You just have to ask: how many of these bad years can a species that has already declined this much deal with?”Community volunteers protect nests and hatchlings on the riverbanks from predators but even after successful breeding seasons the population has not recovered. The turtle is a long-lived species and can bounce back from a poor breeding season. But too few turtles are reaching maturity, which occurs after about 25 to 30 years.The volunteers are now working with researchers from Charles Darwin University to investigate why many juvenile turtles are not surviving to adulthood and what can be done to address this. Results are expected later this year.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Clear Air AustraliaAdam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisisPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionDr Mariana Campbell, a researcher at the university, said “obviously there is something else happening in the river”, and little would be being done to help the turtle were it not for the Tiaro community.Mary River turtle hatchlings. Photograph: Caitlin JonesConnell said volunteers were concerned that the climate crisis was compounding the threats facing the species. She said sea temperatures off the southern Queensland coast had been at record levels before the floods. Scientists say this leads to more intense rain as the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere increases. “You think to yourself, is more of this what we’ve got to look forward to?” Connell said.She said despite the turtle’s critically endangered status, volunteers have had to rely on fundraising drives, selling chocolate turtles and chasing financial support from overseas to continue their conservation work.She was shocked in 2010 when the Landcare group received a conservation grant from the United Arab Emirates. The same fund gave them further grants in 2011 and 2018.After a 2022 flood in Queensland and New South Wales, volunteers also received a $300,000 grant through a state government disaster fund. Connell said this was typical of her experience – that “you have to have a disaster, or the species has to be on its last legs, to get funds”.“It is ironic but that’s the way conservation works in Australia,” she said.She said while community projects like hers could “chip away” at environmental work they ultimately needed serious government and philanthropic support. “We can’t be doing it all off our own backs,” she said.

Some States Are Banning Forever Chemicals. Now Industry Is Fighting Back.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2021, James Kenney and his husband were at a big box store buying a piece of furniture when the sales associate asked if they’d like to add fabric protectant. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s Environment Department, asked to see […]

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2021, James Kenney and his husband were at a big box store buying a piece of furniture when the sales associate asked if they’d like to add fabric protectant. Kenney, the cabinet secretary of New Mexico’s Environment Department, asked to see the product data sheet. Both he and his husband were shocked to see forever chemicals listed as ingredients in the protectant. “I think about your normal, everyday New Mexican who is trying to get by, make their furniture last a little longer, and they think, ‘Oh, it’s safe, great!’ It’s not safe,” he says. “It just so happens that they tried to sell it to the environment secretary.” Last week, the New Mexico legislature passed a pair of bills that Kenney hopes will help protect consumers in his state. If signed by the governor, the legislation would eventually ban consumer products that have added PFAS—per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, known colloquially as “forever chemicals” because of their persistence in the environment—from being sold in New Mexico. As health and environmental concerns about forever chemicals mount nationally, New Mexico joins a small but growing number of states that are moving to limit—and, in some cases, ban—PFAS in consumer products. New Mexico is now the third state to pass a PFAS ban through the legislature. Ten other states have bans or limits on added PFAS in certain consumer products, including cookware, carpet, apparel, and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states—a record number—have PFAS-related bills before state legislatures, according to an analysis of bills by Safer States, a network of state-based advocacy organizations working on issues around potentially unsafe chemicals. The chemical and consumer products industries have taken notice of this new wave of regulations and are mounting a counterattack, lobbying state legislatures to advocate for the safety of their products—and, in one case, suing to prevent the laws from taking effect. Some of the key exemptions made in New Mexico highlight some of the big fights that industries are hoping they’ll win in statehouses across the country: fights they are already taking to a newly industry-friendly US Environmental Protection Agency. PFAS is not just one chemical but a class of thousands. The first PFAS were developed in the 1930s; thanks to their nonstick properties and unique durability, their popularity grew in industrial and consumer uses in the postwar era. The chemicals were soon omnipresent in American lives, coating cookware, preventing furniture and carpets from staining, and acting as a surfactant in firefighting foam. “Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life.” In 1999, a man in West Virginia filed a lawsuit against US chemical giant DuPont alleging that pollution from its factory was killing his cattle. The lawsuit revealed that DuPont had concealed evidence of PFAS’s negative health effects on workers from the government for decades. In the years since, the chemical industry has paid out billions in settlement fees around PFAS lawsuits: In 2024, the American multinational 3M agreed to pay between $10 billion and $12.5 billion to US public water systems that had detected PFAS in their water supplies to pay for remediation and future testing, though the company did not admit liability. (DuPont and its separate chemical company Chemours continue to deny any wrongdoing in lawsuits involving them, including the original West Virginia suit.) As the moniker “forever chemicals” suggests, mounting research has shown that PFAS accumulate in the environment and in our bodies and can be responsible for a number of health problems, from high cholesterol to reproductive issues and cancer. EPA figures released earlier this year show that almost half of the US population is currently exposed to PFAS in their drinking water. Nearly all Americans, meanwhile, have at least one type of PFAS in their blood. For a class of chemicals with such terrifying properties, there’s been surprisingly little regulation of PFAS at the federal level. One of the most-studied PFAS chemicals, PFOA, began to be phased out in the US in the early 2000s, with major companies eliminating the chemical and related compounds under EPA guidance by 2015. The chemical industry and manufacturers say that the replacements they have found for the most dangerous chemicals are safe. But the federal government, as a whole, has lagged behind the science when it comes to regulations: The EPA only set official drinking water limits for six types of PFAS in 2024. In lieu of federal guidance, states have started taking action. In 2021, Maine, which identified an epidemic of PFAS pollution on its farms in 2016, passed the first-ever law banning the sale of consumer products with PFAS. Minnesota followed suit in 2023. “The cookware industry has historically not really engaged in advocacy, whether it’s advocacy or regulatory,” says Steve Burns, a lobbyist who represents the industry. But laws against PFAS in consumer products—particularly a bill in California, which required cookware manufacturers to disclose to consumers if they use any PFAS chemicals in their products—were a “wakeup call” for the industry. Burns is president of the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, a 501(c)(6) formed in 2024 by two major companies in the cookware industry. He and his colleagues have had a busy year, testifying in 10 statehouses across the country against PFAS restrictions or bans (and, in some cases, in favor of new laws that would exempt their products from existing bans). In February, the CSA was one of more than 40 industry groups and manufacturers to sign a letter to New Mexico lawmakers opposing its PFAS ban when it was first introduced. The CSA also filed a suit against the state of Minnesota in January, alleging that its PFAS ban is unconstitutional. Its work has paid off. Unlike the Maine or Minnesota laws, the New Mexico bill specifically exempts fluoropolymers, a key ingredient in nonstick cookware and a type of PFAS chemical, from the coming bans. The industry has also seen success overseas: France excluded kitchenware from its recent PFAS ban following a lobbying push by Cookware Sustainability Alliance member Groupe SEB. (The CSA operates only in the US and was not involved in that effort.) A redefinition of PFAS by the federal government could “have a chilling effect on state legislation.” “As an industry, we do believe that if we’re able to make our case, we’re able to have a conversation, present the science and all the independent studies we have, most times people will say well, you make a good point,” Burns says. “This is a different chemistry.” It’s not just the cookware industry making this argument. Erich Shea, the director of product communications at the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED in an email that the group supports New Mexico’s fluoropolymer exclusion and that it will “allow New Mexico to avoid the headaches experienced by decisionmakers in other states.” The FDA has authorized nonstick cookware for human use since the 1960s. Some research—including one peer-reviewed study conducted by the American Chemistry Council’s Performance Fluoropolymer Partnership, whose members include 3M and Chemours, has found that fluoropolymers are safe to consume and less harmful than other types of PFAS. Separate research has called their safety into question. However, the production of fluoropolymers for use in nonstick cookware and other products has historically released harmful PFAS into the environment. And while major US manufacturers have phased out PFOA in their production chain, other factories overseas still use the chemical in making fluoropolymers. The debate over fluoropolymers’ inclusion in state bans is part of a larger argument made by industry and business groups: that states are defining PFAS chemicals too broadly, opening the door to overregulation of safe products. A position paper from the Cookware Sustainability Alliance provided to WIRED lambasts the “indiscriminate definition of PFAS” in many states with recent bans or restrictions. “Our argument is that fluoropolymers are very different from PFAS chemicals of concern,” Burns says. Some advocates disagree. The exemption of fluoropolymers from New Mexico’s ban, along with a host of other industry-specific exemptions in the bill, means that the legislation “is not going to meet the stated intentions of what the bill’s sponsors want it to do,” says Gretchen Salter, the policy director at Safer States. Advocates like Salter have concerns around the use of forever chemicals in the production of fluoropolymers as well as their durability throughout their life cycles. “Fluoropolymers are PFAS. PFAS plastics are PFAS. They are dangerous at every stage of their life, from production to use to disposal,” she claims. Kenney acknowledges that the fluoropolymer exemption has garnered a “little bit of criticism.” But he says that this bill is meant to be a starting point. “We’re not trying to demonize PFAS—it’s in a lot of things that we rightfully still use—but we are trying to gauge the risk,” he says. “We don’t expect this to be a one and done. We expect science to grow and the exemptions to change.” With a newly industry-friendly set of regulators in DC, industry groups are looking for wins at the federal level too. In February, an organization of chemical manufacturers and business groups, including the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, sent a letter to the EPA outlining suggested “principles and policy recommendations” around PFAS. The group emphasized the need to “recognize that PFAS are a broad class of chemistries with very diverse and necessary properties” and recommended the agency adopt a government-wide definition of PFAS based on West Virginia and Delaware’s definitions. Both of those states have a much more conservative definition of what defines PFAS than dozens of other states, including Maine, New Mexico, and Minnesota. A federal definition like this could “have a chilling effect on state legislation going forward,” said Melanie Benesh, the vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, an environmental activist organization. “There would be this federal position that the chemical industry could point to, which might be convincing to some state legislators to say, well, this is what the federal government has said is a definition of PFAS. As you start excluding PFAS from the class, you really limit what PFAS are covered by consumer product bans.” Shea, of the American Chemistry Council, told WIRED that the group believes “that the federal regulatory approach is preferable to a patchwork of different and potentially conflicting state approaches.” States with bans face a monumental task in truly getting PFAS out of consumers’ lives. Vendors in Minnesota have been left with expensive inventory that they can no longer sell; Maine’s law, one of the most aggressive, makes exemptions for “currently unavoidable use” of PFAS, including in semiconductors, lab equipment, and medical devices. PFAS are used in so many of the products in our lives that it’s almost unfathomable to think of phasing them out altogether, as soon as possible. For advocates like Salter, it’s a change worth making. “There might be essential uses for PFAS right now,” she says. “But we want to spur the search for safer alternatives, because we don’t want to give a pass to chemicals that are harming human health. By exempting them altogether, you are completely removing that incentive.”

British Police Arrest Greenpeace UK Head Over Red-Dye Protest at US Embassy, Group Says

LONDON (Reuters) - British police have arrested the UK head of Greenpeace, alongside five other activists, after they poured 300 litres of...

LONDON (Reuters) - British police have arrested the UK head of Greenpeace, alongside five other activists, after they poured 300 litres of blood-red dye into a pond at the U.S. embassy on Thursday in protest against the U.S. sale of arms to Israel.Will McCallum, the environmental campaign group's UK head, and the others, disguised as delivery riders on bicycles with trailers, Greenpeace said, tipped the dye into the high-security embassy's semi-circular pond.McCallum and the others were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.The Met Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Areeba Hamid, co-executive director at Greenpeace, said that the dye was biodegradable and designed to wash away naturally."We took this action because U.S. weapons continue to fuel an indiscriminate war that's seen bombs dropped on schools and hospitals, entire neighbourhoods blasted to rubble, and tens of thousands of Palestinian lives obliterated," she said in a statement.The Israeli offensive in Gaza was launched after Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel on Oct 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, retaliatory attacks by Israel have left over 50,000 Palestinians dead, health authorities in Gaza say.(Reporting by Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Bernadette Baum)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

‘Yoda’ for scientists: the outsider ecologist whose ideas from the 80s just might fix our future

John Todd’s eco-machine stunned experts by using natural organisms to remove toxic waste from a Cape Cod lagoon. Forty years on, he wants to build a fleet of them to clean up the oceansJohn Todd remembers the moment he knew he was really on to something: “There was no question that it was at the Harwich dump in 1986,” he recalls. This was in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, close to where Todd still lives. Hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. What he was “on to”, he came to realise, was not just a natural way of removing pollution from water, it was a holistic approach to environmental restoration that was way ahead of its time, and possibly still is.An early eco-machine purifying toxic waste on Cape Cod in 1986. Photograph: John Todd Continue reading...

John Todd remembers the moment he knew he was really on to something: “There was no question that it was at the Harwich dump in 1986,” he recalls. This was in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, close to where Todd still lives. Hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. What he was “on to”, he came to realise, was not just a natural way of removing pollution from water, it was a holistic approach to environmental restoration that was way ahead of its time, and possibly still is.Todd’s solution to the Harwich pollution problem was both beautifully simple and unfathomably complex. Next to the lagoons, he assembled a line of 15 clear-sided fiberglass tanks, each about the height of a person, and filled them with water containing all the different life forms he could find from local ponds, marshes and streams – plants, bugs, bacteria, fungi, general gunk. The water could be pumped from one tank to the next, and the living matter inside them soon organised itself into a series of different ecosystems. Todd found that he could put in polluted water from the lagoons at one end of the line of tanks and by the time it came out the other end, 10 days later, it was clean enough to drink.“To see that water, and to see all the organisms in the tanks, including fishes, looking and being so healthy, I was just amazed,” he says.Todd didn’t know exactly what was going on in those tanks – he would later discover that various microorganisms were finding uses for the toxins and heavy metals – but he didn’t need to, he says. “All I really knew going into it was all the kingdoms of life had to be in there. Nobody knew which ones could cope with what we had, but there’s probably no problem they haven’t solved in one way or another over the last three or four billion years.” Todd calls it “biological intelligence”.“The thing that separates myself and my colleagues is that we really do celebrate the living world for what it’s beginning to show us it can do,” he says.There’s just so many positive directions that are possible and economically feasibleTodd christened his invention the “eco-machine”, and spent the next four decades understanding and refining it, applying it to everything from treating wastewater to growing food to repairing damaged ecosystems. Now aged 85, he is still at work, inventing new solutions to a set of environmental problems that has only deepened.Todd’s latest proposal is his most ambitious yet, something he calls “the Fleet”. The idea is very simple, he says: a fleet of sailing vessels, each containing one of his eco-machines. These could be deployed to clean up coastal environmental disasters on site, wherever they are needed. Each sailing eco-machine, Todd says, is “an incubator of beneficial organisms into the environment surrounding it”. Each vessel would take polluted sea water and not only clean it but add helpful organisms and nutrients to it, such as diatoms, which he calls the “baby milk” of the marine food chain.It sounds romantic, challenging, far-fetched even, but between his knowledge of ecological design and naval architecture, Todd seems to have figured it all out: the design of the sailing vessels (inspired by 19th-century Thames barges); how to keep the tanks full of liquid stable on board; energy and lighting; how much water these relatively small vessels could treat. Powered by wind and sun, the entire operation would be fossil fuel-free, he says, “and the fact that they’re going to be so beautiful, they’re going to be the sort of technology neighbourhoods are going to want to have in their back yards”.Maybe I should just slow down and let them catch up before I go galloping off with sailing eco-machines. But I can’t, I’m not young enoughTodd estimates a fleet of 30 such vessels could clean up maritime pollution for about a quarter of the cost of conventional processes. He would love to get two 40ft prototype vessels built and put them to work on nearby Waquoit Bay, which would cost about $20m (£15.5m), he says. Like many coastal areas, Cape Cod’s inshore waters are dying, largely as a result of pollution from domestic sewage. The sea-run brook trout, the shellfish and the eelgrass he saw in the 1960s are hardly to be found any more. Every summer, scores of Massachusetts beaches close after heavy rains because of sewage pollution.Todd knows how to fix it, and much more besides, he believes, but, as has been the case since the 1970s, his ideas are still too wide-ranging for the compartmentalised scientific world to fully understand, he says. Despite having won numerous awards and accolades, he has always been something of an outsider scientist. “Maybe I should just slow down, and let them catch up before I go galloping off with sailing eco-machines,” he says. “But I can’t, I’m not young enough.”Born in Ontario, Canada, Todd has always loved the water and boats. His father designed and built yachts as a hobby, and he has done the same. He studied agriculture and marine biology, but by the time he came to Cape Cod in 1969 and took a post at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he was beginning to chafe against the strictures and compartmentalisation of academia. He was also becoming increasingly worried about the environment.In 1969, Todd co-founded the New Alchemy Institute with his wife, Nancy, and a colleague, Bill McClarney – not quite a hippy commune, an alternative research institute (associates included visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, economist EF Schumacher and Lynn Margulis, co-creator of the Gaia hypothesis). “I decided I wasn’t a doomwatch ecologist,” Todd says. “Doomwatch can be left to other people, I was more interested in solutions.”The 13-acre (five-hectare) New Alchemy site is a few minutes’ drive from where he and Nancy still live. Its mission was to explore joined-up, sustainable ways of living: energy, food, shelter, waste. They planted organic crops, farmed fish and built wind turbines and experimental architecture – all underpinned by a belief that the more systems they had working together, the stronger the whole would be, just like the organisms in one of his eco-machines.That first eco-machine, in Harwich, ought to have gained Todd national attention; instead it earned him a lawsuit from the state regulators. Apparently nobody was permitted to treat waste without a civil engineering degree. “I appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe, described with a word I’d never heard before, ‘scofflaw’,” he says, chuckling. “The head of the Environmental Protection Agency heard about my fight and sent one of his scientists up to review the data and what I was doing. He went back and he said, ‘He’s legitimate.’” The EPA subsequently honoured him with an award (indeed, an EPA study in 2002 found Todd’s technology to be “typically cost competitive with more conventional wastewater treatment systems”).After the New Alchemy Institute wound down, Todd founded his own ecological consultancy, Ocean Arks International. It has designed and built more than 100 eco-machine systems to treat problems of pollution, wastewater and food production around the world, from the US to China, Australia, Brazil and Scotland. He has drawn up proposals for islands owned by Richard Branson, Marlon Brando and Leonardo DiCaprio (only Branson actually implemented them).Todd’s eco-machines are cheaper and more effective than industrial alternatives, he says, and are even capable of treating chemicals that have been impossible to break down using conventional methods, such as grades of crude oil and mining waste. They are also far more sustainable – powered almost entirely by sunlight.All of which begs the question: why aren’t they more widely used? One reason is prevailing attitudes, Todd suggests. “Civil engineering schools tend to eschew innovation and invention. Hardware is tinkered with and new components are added at a pretty slow pace. A 100-year-old waste water treatment plant looks pretty similar to a contemporary one.”At the same time, for all his scientific skills, Todd is the first to admit he has never been much of a businessman. His career is strewn with startups and partnerships that fell by the wayside for various reasons. However, many of his ideas have seeped into the mainstream and some of his ideas have been developed in a more commerical way, including by his son, Jonathan.It is not just Todd who can vouch for their efficacy. Three years ago, under Todd’s guidance, the Dutch environmental restoration company the Weather Makers built their own eco-machine in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, with 12 water tanks housed under a 50ft-diameter geodesic dome. They were seeking to process local water polluted by intensive farming into fertile, nutrient-rich water, and to desalinate marine sediments to use in their ecosystem regeneration projects in places such as the Sinai desert.Just as Todd did in Harwich, the Weather Makers’ co-founder Ties van der Hoeven found the results were “amazing”. “Everything he said was just spot on, and certain things really overtook our expectations,” says van der Hoeven. “Everything is growing like crazy.” Tomato plants growing inside the dome with the treated water are 20-30% bigger than ones grown with groundwater, he says.Like many others, he did not really understand Todd’s approach until he put it into practice. “Hopefully now, with this planetary craziness we’re entering into, we’re starting to recognise these kinds of holistic solutions better,” he says. He likens Todd to Yoda from the Star Wars movies – the keeper of an ecological wisdom born in the 1960s and 70s but forgotten, “a bit like the Renaissance being forgotten in the middle ages, and then now people are picking it up again”.As ever, Todd remains an optimist. “I feel we know how to fix the ocean, I feel we know how to fix the deserts, I feel we know how to fix the urban environment, and so we’ve just got to get the story moving,” he says. “There’s just so many positive directions that are possible and economically feasible. If we could get the larger public really excited about how nature can be made to clean up, then people would say, ‘we can do it. We’ve got a future.’”

Military's use of toxic 'forever chemicals' leaves lasting scars

This excerpt comes from the forthcoming book Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, which details how a set of toxic compounds have devastated entire communities across the country. It has been edited for length and clarity. Colorado Springs and its suburbs in El Paso County are surrounded not only by natural wonders like the Garden...

This excerpt comes from the forthcoming book Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America, which details how a set of toxic compounds have devastated entire communities across the country. It has been edited for length and clarity. Colorado Springs and its suburbs in El Paso County are surrounded not only by natural wonders like the Garden of the Gods, a massive park filled with red rock formations, but also several military installations, including Peterson Space Force Base, the US Air Force Academy, and the US Army’s Fort Carson. Mark Favors grew up in the shadow of these bases, part of a tightly knit Black family within the largely White Colorado Springs. As Mark tells it, Cold War–era patriotism molded the city into a libertarian stronghold in which the small-government ideology reigned and “politics was highly, highly, highly discouraged.” Military service, on the other hand, was the bread and butter of the community, a major source of jobs in a rural region. The area is home to about 45,000 military personnel and 15,000 federal employees, as well approximately 90,000 veterans. Mark’s family is no different. Today an ICU nurse in New York City, Mark is himself a veteran, as is his uncle and multiple other relatives. His large squadron of cousins, multiple-times-removed—some blood relations, and others not—have served in most branches of the military, leaving an intercontinental web of bootprints in their wake. Likewise, his mom, Lillian Clark Favors, is a retired Air Force security manager, and his grandmother, Arletha, spent thirty-six years working as a civil servant at Fort Carson. It is a staunchly patriot family—but one that has, in recent years, begun to question why this long history of military service seems to dovetail with an extensive pattern of disease. Sitting at his mother’s dining room table in Colorado Springs, Mark attempted to tabulate exactly how many people in his extended family had suffered from various iterations of cancer and other sometimes-fatal illnesses. That headcount, he estimated, includes more than two dozen cousins, siblings, and in-laws—but does not even begin to touch upon the friends and neighbors who have similar stories. “Another one of my cousins, he’s getting a port now,” Mark said, referring to the under-skin catheters used in kidney dialysis. At least five of his sick family members suffered from kidney-related diseases. Mark has also noticed how tightly the illness tracks with proximity to certain bases. As far back as 1987, when his mother’s department was transferred from the older Ent Air Force Base, near downtown Colorado Springs, to a new building at Peterson Space Base, on the outskirts of the city, colleagues started falling ill. A colonel in her group, Lillian remembered, decided to retire so that he would be able to take his grandson to kindergarten every day. “And then he got sick, and it was like, in two months, he was dead,” she said. Most striking for Mark’s family, however, is the number of relatives who developed diseases after moving to Widefield, about five miles southwest of Peterson. On retirement from the base, Mark’s grandmother decided to turn her hobby of making porcelain dolls into a second career and relocated to the suburb with her husband and son (Mark’s father) in the late 1970s. Mark’s cousin Vikki recalled the moment when her grandmother pulled the family together one Thanksgiving in the late 1980s—with the news that her doctors had discovered a lump and that she was going to need surgery. Following the diagnosis and the surgery, Arletha went through a course of chemotherapy. “And then she started having issues breathing,” Vikki continued. Her cancer had returned. She succumbed to her illness on November 19, 1991, after about a week in the hospital. “She just never was able to recover,” Vikki said. Members of the immediate family who never moved from Colorado Springs to Widefield enjoyed long lives, several living into their nineties. Meanwhile, Arletha’s husband also died of cancer, and her son, who had no kidney issues prior to living in Widefield, developed renal failure and had a subsequent kidney transplant. But after the new kidney became cancerous, he too passed away, at the age of sixty-nine, in 2017. Less than a year later, Mark was visiting his mother when a CBS This Morning special came on TV. As they watched an episode about perfluorochemicals—PFCs—Mark had an unsettling epiphany. “I just started doing more research into it,” Mark remembered, detailing how he began exploring Colorado state environmental mapping data. PFCs, which today are known as PFAS, are a family of synthetic chemicals that have been used in a wide variety of household products from nonstick pans to waterproof clothing and cosmetics to fast food wrappers. These substances have also been linked to various cancers, kidney, liver and thyroid problems and immune system and fertility issues. They were also used for years in military-grade firefighting foam known as aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, which in many cases leached off of bases and into the water supplies of unsuspecting communities nearby. Among Mark’s first moves was to talk to local politicians, as well as try to get his family’s water tested. Ultimately, Mark discovered that the Widefield property was contaminated with PFAS at levels that far surpassed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) drinking water health advisories at the time. Courtesy of Mark Favors Several sets of groundwater samples taken just a half mile west of the property between 2016 and 2018 indicated that the area’s contamination was up to four times those safety thresholds. Rising from his seat at the dining table, Mark milled around the room and picked up a framed certificate that honored his mother for her four decades of service at Peterson. Similar certificates are likely sitting in houses all over Colorado Springs, documenting not only years of service but years of exposure to toxic chemicals. Members of the Favors family had no idea that the firefighting foam being used on nearby bases contained PFAS, or that those chemicals were dangerous, or that they were leaching into the local water supply. But the military, like industry, already had some indication of AFFF’s toxic effects decades before such information became public knowledge. In 1971, the Air Force Research Laboratory flagged the foam in use at the time—3M’s “Light Water”—as both a possible threat to certain fish and a “serious pollutant,” due to its inability to easily break down in water. A few years later, Air Force researchers tested another iteration of Light Water and deemed it “less toxic” than previous PFAS-based foams, but still said it should not be released in substantial quantities if animals would be exposed for several days after the release. In the same era, a 1975 report prepared by a contractor for the Defense Department affirmed that AFFF foams contain PFAS “which are largely resistant to biodegradation.” Five years later, a Navy review suggested that AFFF shouldn’t be used in training at all, noting that it “may present serious environmental pollution problems” and that existing treatment facilities cannot process the substance. Other problematic aspects of PFAS that are more widely known today, such as their toxic byproducts when PFAS are heated, were also noted in the 1970s and 1980s. There did appear to be some knowledge gaps, however, including, as one naval commander put it in correspondence accompanying a 1978 report, 3M’s failure to disclose “any useful information” about the foam’s ingredients. Nevertheless, a 1979 navy guide had also already listed “firefighting agents (e.g., AFFF)” as “hazardous.” Meanwhile, a 1981 document went as far as raising legal concerns, flagging AFFF sludge for evaluation as potentially hazardous waste “to assess the Navy’s responsibility” under a waste cleanup law. The knowledge soon trickled down to the installation level, with a 1985 report conducted at Peterson likewise describing AFFF as a “hazardous material,” though the report said that it did not produce hazardous waste. In 1991, assessments from the Army Corps of Engineers conducted at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Fort Ord in California, and Fort Carson in Colorado all recommended a transition to “nonhazardous substitutes.” These warnings did have some effect—at least at select military installations. The Colorado Army base started using water rather than foam for training exercises in 1993, according to a Fort Carson spokesperson. Subsequent policy allowed AFFF to be used only in emergencies, until the base replaced it entirely in 2018. Meanwhile, neighboring Peterson took much longer to act—despite a 1989 internal analysis that demanded better management of AFFF waste. But a central issue was that the air force simply has more planes on their installations than does the army on theirs, and jet fuel is particularly flammable when vaporized at high temperatures. In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration for years required all airport firefighters to test their AFFF supplies—and until 2019, the foam was discharged into the environment. Regardless of exactly why the military continued to use AFFF long after the hazards were known, the results were hard-hitting: in communities like Widefield, the firefighting foam flowed into the local water supply—and ultimately tainted residential taps. To Mark Favors, that fact embodies the region’s symbiotic yet subservient relationship with the Defense Department, which he said has left a “trail of human devastation” in its path. Given the extent of the contamination and the onslaught of illnesses that have rattled families across El Paso County, both Mark and his mother, Lillian, now look back at past years with newfound suspicion. “It just kind of makes you wonder, as I say, did they know there was a problem from the beginning, when they started buying the foam or whatever?” Lillian asked. “Did they know?” By November 2016, the US Army Corps of Engineers had detected PFAS at Peterson—noting that the chemicals “may present potential, non-carcinogenic risks to human health and the environment.” Subsequent inspections, published the following year, found significant levels of PFAS in the groundwater at the base’s fire training area. Although no drinking water wells were immediately adjacent to that area, the “migration of PFAS-impacted groundwater offsite is possible and downgradient drinking water wells could be impacted,” the authors concluded. Even down the I-25 highway at Fort Carson, the US Army base where AFFF hadn’t been used in more than three decades, the environment has remained contaminated both on and off the base itself. At multiple spots cited in a January 2022 report, levels of several types of PFAS exceeded risk thresholds set by military leadership—who use those levels to determine the need for further investigation of a given site. In response to the findings, a spokesperson said that the army would evaluate “the nature and extent of PFAS releases and conduct risk assessments using the latest EPA toxicity data.” Such contamination is by no means limited to Colorado, but it has reached military families via vastly different pathways. Peterson’s PFAS pollution has largely flowed into the faucets of off-installation communities downstream, while households on-base have benefited from clean drinking water supplied by Colorado Springs Utilities. This was not necessarily the case on other Defense Department establishments: an internal memorandum showed that as of December 2019, the military served as the direct drinking water provider for about 175,000 people in twenty-four on-site neighborhoods in which levels of PFOA, PFOS, or both were considered unsafe. After the EPA updated the levels that were considered safe in 2022, an advocacy organization called the Environmental Working Group estimated that 600,000 service members were imbibing contaminated water. Meanwhile, blood tests issued to military firefighters over the past few years—as mandated by Congress—have revealed PFAS in virtually all samples. At least one scathing assessment of the military’s behavior has come from within—from the inspector general (IG), an independent internal watchdog for the Defense Department. In 2021, the watchdog dinged the military for declining to “proactively mitigate” risks related to AFFF, contrary to its own policies. While officials had issued a “risk alert” for the foam in 2011, that warning was never elevated, and administrators therefore did not have to respond—and they didn’t until 2016. The watchdog also found “no evidence” that officials on bases, including firefighters, were made aware of the alert. “As a result, people and the environment may have been exposed to preventable risks from PFAS‑containing AFFF,” the report said. Richard Kidd, a high-ranking military official overseeing environmental issues, justified the behavior on the grounds that the military “learned about the health hazards posed by PFAS basically at the same pace as the rest of America.” Only when the EPA issued a final health advisory in 2016 could the Defense Department “take objective, measurable actions,” he added. Yet to many, the military’s actions are too little, too late. Former Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), a vocal advocate for PFAS action, lamented in a March 2024 interview what he described as “the lack of urgency at the very top of the Defense Department” across presidential administrations. Reached for comment in early 2024 under what was then the Biden administration, a spokesperson for the Pentagon’s leadership declined to answer a list of questions about the military’s use of AFFF, its early knowledge about the substance’s pollution potential, or suggestions that it should have been more proactive. Courtesy of Mark Favors In the spring of 2019, the environment subpanel of the congressional House Oversight and Reform Committee began holding a series of hearings on PFAS. The first three sessions established scientific facts about the substances and featured witness testimony about the pervasiveness of the compounds. They also included corporate voices who downplayed the public health risk, as Harley Rouda—a California Democrat and subcommittee chairman at the time—told his colleagues. The goal of the fourth meeting, in November 2019, he explained, was to encourage “immediate federal action to regulate and cleanup these dangerous chemicals.” Mark Favors was there to testify, revisiting his family’s painful experiences of cancer and death. He spoke alongside actor Mark Ruffalo, who portrayed Rob Bilott, a lawyer who helped bring the PFAS issue into public view and represented contamination victims,in Dark Waters—a film that dramatized the lawyer’s fight against DuPont. Both Bilott and resident Bucky Bailey, born missing one nostril after his mother was exposed to PFOA from working at DuPont while pregnant, were sitting in the gallery during the testimonies. At first, Mark Favors was confused as to why he, out of all PFAS activists, was chosen to speak alongside Ruffalo that day. But then he remembered the sheer number of cancer-related deaths that had stricken his family members, many of whom were veterans. “Most of them survived either Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq, and they’re now in a military cemetery—not for combat wounds but for being poisoned by the military,” Mark said. In addition to sharing his family’s experiences, Mark’s goal in testifying was to push for a congressional investigation into wrongdoing related to PFAS. At the helm of any such investigation, he believes, should be an impartial entity, independent of the Defense Department. Mark noted that courts have held the air force accountable for other wrongs, like failing to notify the FBI about an assault conviction of a former serviceman. After that man went on to carry out a 2017 mass shooting, the air force had to pay $230 million to affected families. But when it comes to contamination, the law dictates that the Department of Defense leads all investigations of pollution that begins on its property, rather than the EPA. And at this point, Mark’s confidence in the Defense Department has been badly shaken, to put it mildly. During the November 2019 hearing, Republicans and Democrats alike professed a commitment to ensuring that American communities have access to clean, uncontaminated drinking water—although they had very different thoughts about how to get there. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) cautioned against “taking any sweeping actions” that could harm the economy, while stressing that he does “wholeheartedly support if any families have been poisoned intentionally by corporate America that they get compensated for that.” On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) used most of her time to revisit Mark’s main points, reflecting on the notion that “the army has said this is dangerous.” “That is why we need subpoenas issued for this and we need a comprehensive investigation from Congress,” Mark said in his testimony. “I concur. I concur with you, Mr. Favors,” the congresswoman agreed. Courtesy of Mark Favors The military as a whole is evaluating hundreds of potentially polluted bases to see which might require PFAS cleanup. By the end of 2023, the Defense Department had assessed more than 700 bases and found that 574 of them needed remediation. But such widespread restoration could take years — well into the 2030s for some bases and through 2048 for one particularly problematic site. Nonetheless, the military was taking some intermediate cleanup steps at a small fraction of these polluted installations—just forty as of 2024—while the larger process played out. Amid the lucky locations were Peterson and Fort Carson. Mark Favors has pressed on in hopes that one distant Hail Mary might rattle the scoreboard that has thus far indicated repeated defeat. After all, he explained, the mission of “taking on the Pentagon is not for the weak.” He went so far as to chase down then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) after a PFAS-related hearing, upon remembering that Harris’s stepson had graduated from Colorado College in Colorado Springs in 2017. “You remember when you went to your stepson’s graduation?” Mark asked her. “You know the creek behind Colorado College? . . . That’s all contaminated with PFAS.” Following that revelation, he recalled, Harris’s “mouth literally hit the floor.” What Mark would want from a congressional investigation, in theory, is quite simple. He would aim to “to find out what really happened, how pervasive is it, what can be done to prevent it.” Another critical component would involve holding “people accountable if there was something nefarious, as the documents imply.” A key reason behind the need for such an investigation, from Mark’s perspective, is the lack of legal recourse. Mark has faced repeated stumbling blocks in his quest “to get justice and accountability,” as he said in his 2019 congressional testimony.

New York City is making people compost — or pay up

New Yorkers can now get fined for not separating their food scraps. Some critics say that's not the right approach.

Property owners and landlords in New York City can now be fined $25 or more if residents are found throwing a banana peel in the trash. As of April 1, all New Yorkers must separate organic waste — that includes food scraps, food-soiled paper (like empty pizza boxes), and leaf and yard waste — from the rest of their trash, similar to how metal, glass, paper, and plastic is set aside for recycling.  This is how the city is encouraging — or indeed, mandating — participation in its curbside composting program, where food waste is collected weekly by the sanitation department, same as the trash and recycling. Mandatory curbside composting is still relatively new in New York City; the program only rolled out in all five boroughs late last year.  The best use of food, of course, is to feed people. When it can’t do that, composting is one tool to help reduce emissions from organic waste — the methane released as food decays in landfills is a major driver of global warming. As a whole, the United States wastes as much food as it did nearly 10 years ago, despite setting an ambitious goal to cut food waste in half.  Getting New Yorkers onboard with composting will take time — and effort. When it comes to diverting food waste from landfills by composting it instead, New York lags far behind other large U.S. cities. The city recovered less than 5 percent of eligible households’ organic waste in the 2024 fiscal year. The fines announced this month are designed to boost compliance; in the first week of April, the New York City Department of Sanitation, or DSNY, issued nearly 2,000 tickets for allegedly failing to separate organics.   “That is only half the story: We picked up 2.5 million pounds of compostable material last week,” said Vincent Gragnani, press secretary for DSNY, “a 240 percent increase over the 737,000 pounds collected during the same week last year.” But critics say the city should focus more on educating residents on the benefits of composting.  “My concern is that, instead of doing outreach, we’re focusing on fear-mongering,” said Lou Reyes, a local composting advocate. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Reyes and his partner started a volunteer-run effort in Astoria, Queens, to collect and compost neighborhood food waste. He described the city’s recovery rate of organic waste prior to the rollout of fines as “pretty shameful.”  The lackluster participation in the city’s composting program may be a function of time — Seattle, for example, banned organics in the trash 10 years ago. In San Francisco, composting has been mandatory since 2009.  Still, experts say boosting food waste collection in New York, a metropolis with more than 8 million people, will also take dedicated education and outreach. “I would say our biggest tool that the department uses is education,” said Joseph Piasecki, the public affairs and policy coordinator for San Francisco’s environmental department. He mentioned that the city’s organics hauler works to notify residents and businesses of potential mix-ups before fining them.  “They will reach out, our department will reach out, we will call, we’ll put boots on the ground to go, like physically go, there, and be like, How can we help you be successful?” said Piasecki.  A worker walks past piles of yard waste at the New York City Department of Sanitation composting facility in Staten Island. Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images At a preliminary budget hearing last month, DSNY said it has sent out citywide mailers about the composting fines; the department is also meeting with every community board and holding information sessions for residents and property managers to better educate the public about the program. And Piasecki stressed that San Francisco’s composting program should not serve as a direct comparison for New York’s. About 800,000 people live in San Francisco, roughly a tenth of the population of New York City. It also covers a much smaller geographic area: about 50 square miles compared to just over 300. A better comparison might be Los Angeles, a city of more than 3 million that just rolled out a mandatory curbside composting program two years ago. But adding to DSNY’s composting woes is that the agency has failed to reassure critics of the composting program, who argue the city is misleading residents about what happens to their food scraps while also creating an environmental justice issue.   As of now, food waste that gets picked up by DSNY will usually wind up in one of two places: a composting facility on Staten Island or a wastewater-treatment plant on the edge of Brooklyn and Queens. But last year, DSNY reported that only one-fifth of food waste collected actually makes it to the composting facility. The rest is sent to the wastewater-treatment plant in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. (Asked for updated figures, Gragnani said the department did not have a precise breakdown, as the numbers often fluctuate.)   At the wastewater-treatment plant, organic waste is mixed with sewage sludge and broken down in an anaerobic digester, where it produces methane and other gases. This cocktail of gases — known as biogas — can then serve multiple purposes: It can be used on-site to power the facility itself, or it could be refined into renewable natural gas and used to heat homes. Instead, the New York City plant has been blasted by locals for flaring off excess methane.  The solids leftover from this process — known as the digestate — could technically be used to enhance soils. However, advocates worry it may be too low-quality to be of any use to farmers and gardeners since it was originally mixed with city wastewater, which means it may ultimately end up in landfills, too. (Asked for comment, Gragnani directed Grist to New York state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which operates the digesters.)  In Los Angeles, the city’s guidance on curbside organics collection is clear about where it goes: Food scraps and yard waste collected are turned into compost that is then used by farmers to grow organic products. In San Francisco, according to Piasecki, some of the compost created by scraps is then used by Napa Valley wineries. He added that this could be a moment “for New York to develop that kind of story,” especially if compost from the city eventually helps rural communities throughout the state. A hauler moves a container of compostable materials in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images For now, DSNY may have its hands full, answering to critics who say the anaerobic digestion process further entrenches the fossil fuel industry at a time when cities need instead to decarbonize.   For example, when biogas is converted into what’s known as renewable natural gas and then given to the local utility company for free, it’s “creating an incentive for rebuilding all the [gas] pipes and making the investments in this fossil fuel infrastructure,” said Eric Goldstein, the New York City environmental director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Asked to respond to these criticisms, Gragnani, the press secretary for DSNY, said, “Would the ‘local environmental advocates’ you spoke with prefer that we use fracked gas to heat homes and businesses? Unfortunately, their rhetoric can discourage participation and send more food and yard waste to release methane in faraway landfills.” Anaerobic digestion can play an important role within food-waste reduction programs, said Marcel R. Howard, zero-waste program manager at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. But he added that it “must be implemented within zero-waste and social justice frameworks to prevent environmental harm and prioritize community needs.”  In the end, New York City has its work cut out for it. Reyes said that he wants to see “real, legitimate” outreach from DSNY on why separating food waste matters. “I am a huge supporter of municipal organic recovery that actually works,” he said. That means having the community actually buy into the idea of keeping food out of landfills and ensuring environmental justice issues — like flaring methane in a populous neighborhood — are not created in the process. “Those are, I think, more acceptable and more dignified solutions than the mess that we have in New York City,” he added. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New York City is making people compost — or pay up on Apr 10, 2025.

Pollen peril: how heat, thunder and smog are creating deadly hay fever seasons

Scientists say a complex mix of factors are making seasonal allergies worse for longer in many parts of the world – but why is it happening and is it here to stay?The first time it happened, László Makra thought he had flu. The symptoms appeared from nowhere at the end of summer in 1989: his eyes started streaming, his throat was tight and he could not stop sneezing. Makra was 37 and otherwise fit and healthy, a mid-career climate scientist in Szeged, Hungary. Winter eventually came and he thought little of it. Then, it happened the next year. And the next.“I had never had these symptoms before. It was high summer: it was impossible to have the flu three consecutive years in a row,” he says. Continue reading...

The first time it happened, László Makra thought he had flu. The symptoms appeared from nowhere at the end of summer in 1989: his eyes started streaming, his throat was tight and he could not stop sneezing. Makra was 37 and otherwise fit and healthy, a mid-career climate scientist in Szeged, Hungary. Winter eventually came and he thought little of it. Then, it happened the next year. And the next.“I had never had these symptoms before. It was high summer: it was impossible to have the flu three consecutive years in a row,” he says.The following year, a doctor finally tracked down the culprit: common ragweed. Transported to Europe from North America in the 1800s, the invasive species has become widespread in parts of central and eastern Europe. The weed is highly allergenic: a single plant produces millions of tiny grains of airborne pollen and for some asthma sufferers, exposure can be life-threatening. In the US, almost 50 million people are affected by common ragweed each year, extending the allergy season into early November.After the diagnosis, Makra switched the focus of his research to how rising temperatures impact pollen. Now 73, the University of Szeged professor has become a leading international expert on the subject, co-authoring studies that show the pollen season is becoming longer and more severe in many places around the world as temperatures increase.Common ragweed, an invasive plant introduced to Europe in the 19th century, is highly allergenic. Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty ImagesWhile there is a clear rise in the number of people reporting hay fever symptoms each year – part of a global surge in allergies – the reasons behind it are complicated and not yet fully understood.Pollution, rising temperatures, increasing thunderstorms and the spread of invasive species are all transforming the world of pollen, with consequences that vary from place to place and year to year. In turn, these changes are having complex, varied effects on the human body – with sometimes deadly or debilitating consequences.Thunderstorm asthmaIn November 2016 in Melbourne, emergency departments saw a wave of thousands of admissions after a thunderstorm during peak pollen season, resulting in at least nine deaths and dozens of people in intensive care. More than 8,500 people visited hospitals after the storm, with police and firefighters receiving thousands of calls from people with breathing difficulties. The combination of plunging temperatures, rising humidity and a high pollen count drove the rare weather event, which has also been recorded in London, Birmingham and Naples.Jaxon Dowal with his father, Chris Dowal, at Sunshine hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Jaxon was one of many patients admitted with asthma symptoms after a thunderstorm in November 2016. Photograph: Justin McManus/Fairfax Media/Getty ImagesAlthough rare, thunderstorms are a known trigger for asthma attacks, and hay fever suffers are more likely to be affected. These “asthma epidemics” have only been recorded during pollen and outdoor mould seasons. Exactly how storms trigger the attacks is not clear, but scientists have proposed it is a combination of wind blowing more pollen into the air, and moisture in the atmosphere breaking pollen particles into smaller pieces – so they can penetrate more deeply into airways. As more moisture builds up in the atmosphere due to global heating, thunderstorms are becoming more common and intense.PollutionSince the 1960s, scientists say more than 350,000 chemical molecules have been introduced into everyday life, many of which are harmful pollutants. They are interacting with pollen and the human body to make hay fever worse.First, particulate pollution from cars and industry is interacting with pollen, causing it to produce more allergens. One study of birch pollen in Poland, which affects about a quarter of UK hay fever sufferers, found that pollen in polluted areas had higher levels of a key allergen: Bet v1. The results of this effect are being seen in symptom surveys. A 2023 study by scientists at the University of Manchester found that people living in towns and cities reported significantly more severe hay fever symptoms, indicating a potential relationship with urban pollutants.Next, researchers theorise that modern chemicals and pollutants are damaging the protective layers in our skin and mucus, making them “leaky” and therefore more exposed to allergens. Known as the “epithelial barrier hypothesis”, experts say this is one of the factors behind the growth in people suffering with pollen allergies as well as sensitivities to food and autoimmune conditions.A haze obscures landmarks in London during a high air pollution warning in March 2022. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty ImagesProf Claudia Traidl-Hoffmann at the Institute of Environmental Medicine and Integrative Health, University hospital Augsburg in Germany, says: “Our epithelial cells – that perform as a protective barrier on our skin and organs – are constantly being attacked by chemicals in the modern era: ultra fine particles, carbon particles, volatile organic compounds, chemicals in water, clothing, in our nutrition. They are all acting on our bodies, our gut, our oesophagus. The nearer a child lives to a high-traffic road, the higher the probability a child develops asthma and allergies.”Contact with animals – particularly cows and dogs – is known to help prevent the development of allergies, Traidl-Hoffmann says, as does a diet varied in plants for young children.Climate breakdownIn many countries, the hay fever season is starting earlier, lasting longer and producing higher pollen loads – and there are predictions that rising temperatures will cause a major increase in severity over time. One estimate for north-west Europe indicates a 60% future increase.Plants that we associate with allergies are moving or migrating northwardChanges are already being recorded. A 2019 study found that from Iceland to Canada, several locations in the northern hemisphere are seeing rises in the cumulative pollen released by plants as they benefit from higher CO2 levels and warmer temperatures. In the US, a recent review found a similar trend, with pollen production projected to increase by 16–40% by the end of the century. But this is not occurring everywhere and the changes are complicated and variable, with extreme heat and flooding sometimes decreasing pollen levels. In the UK, only about 30 pollens cause hay fever, with grass pollen the most common. Across Britain, there have been very modest changes in recent years in allergenic pollen, say researchers. Birch pollen levels in central England have risen – with a clear link to climate change – while others have not seen a difference.Beverley Adams-Groom, a researcher at the University of Worcester who worked with the Met Office on pollen forecasts for 29 years, says: “To a certain extent, pollen levels [in the UK] haven’t changed all that much. Grass pollen, which is one of the most important pollen types for UK hay fever sufferers as it affects about 95% of hay fever sufferers – has not shown any distinct change in the trend since about 2007.”Some of the worst-offending species are set to benefit from global heating, with the common ragweed season having already extended by 25 days in parts of the US and Canada.Birch pollen has risen in central England due to climate breakdown. Photograph: Shotshop GmbH/AlamyLewis Ziska, an associate professor in environmental health sciences at Columbia University, says: “We know that of the plants that we associate with allergies, they are moving or migrating northward. So, for example, if you look at common ragweed, which is a progenitor for pollen in the fall, it’s now showing up in places in Norway and Sweden, and other places where it has not been seen previously. The winters are getting milder, and with milder winters, we typically have spring … happening earlier in the year, and then the fall happening later.”Invasive speciesIn some parts of Europe, there is growing recognition of the public health risks from invasive species with allergenic pollen. In Switzerland, leaf beetles that eat common ragweed have been introduced from North America to counteract the plant.But the plant has already infested several regions in Europe, particularly Hungary, the Balkans, southern France and north-west Italy, with an estimated 13.5 million Europeans suffering from allergic reactions to it, resulting in €7.4bn (£6.3bn) worth of health costs a year. With ragweed pollen concentrations projected to quadruple by the middle of the century, this could add more to the economic burden from hay fever.Common ragweed plants are cleared in France to reduce their impact on allergy sufferers. Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty ImagesResearchers say that as the climate changes, so too will the community of plants around the world, with resulting consequences for pollen. But exactly what that will look like is still unclear.“In environmental medicine, it is never only one factor causing something, but a mixture of metrics. It’s like a mosaic. We have a longer pollen season because of climate change. The pollen are more aggressive because of pollution and rising temperatures. Another factor is new pollen from invasive species,” says Traidl-Hoffmann.“My message is not to be afraid. Yes, climate change, is impacting on our health, especially allergies. But let’s take this as a chance and a challenge to do things better in the future,” she says.Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage

Lawsuit Alleging Environmental Racism in Louisiana Parish Allowed to Proceed, Federal Court Says

A federal appellate court says a civil rights lawsuit alleging a south Louisiana parish engaged in racist land-use policies by placing polluting industries in majority-Black communities can move forward

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A civil rights lawsuit alleging a south Louisiana parish engaged in racist land-use policies by placing polluting industries in majority-Black communities can move forward, a federal appellate court says. On Thursday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that a trio of faith-based community groups could proceed with a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in the petrochemical buildout in St. James Parish, a region in the heart of Louisiana's heavily industrialized Chemical Corridor. It is often referred to by environmental groups as “Cancer Alley” for its high levels of pollution.The lawsuit calls for a moratorium on the construction and expansion of petrochemical plants in St. James Parish. When the lawsuit was filed in March 2023, 20 of the 24 industrial facilities were in two sections of the parish with majority-Black populations.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found in a 2003 report that St. James Parish ranked higher than the national average for certain cancer deaths. Both majority-Black sections of the parish are ranked as having a high risk of cancer from toxic pollutants according to an EPA screening tool based on emissions reported by nearby facilities, the lawsuit notes."We have been sounding the alarm for far too long that a moratorium is needed to halt the expansion of any more polluting industries in our neighborhoods, and too many lives have been lost to cancer,” said Gail LeBoeuf, a lifelong parish resident and co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana. She is a plaintiff in the case.The case will now go back to the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana, which had previously ruled the lawsuit was filed too late by Inclusive Louisiana and other community groups because the allegations centered on a 2014 parish land-use plan.But the federal court said the complaint was filed on time and noted that the lawsuit was “replete with allegations of discriminatory land use decisions” in the parish, of which the 2014 plan was just one example.The court also recognized that the groups had a right to sue the parish for authorizing industrial development which “desecrates, destroys, and restricts access” to the cemeteries of their enslaved ancestors in the parish. Many of the petrochemical facilities in Louisiana are built on former plantations, and few of the burial sites of the enslaved have been preserved.“I think it’s a real vindication of their struggle," said Pamela Spees, a lawyer with the Center of Constitutional Rights representing the plaintiffs. “This is a case about long-running ongoing discrimination and now we get to deal with the claims on their merits.”St. James Parish did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Brook on the social platform X: @jack_brook96.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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