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How Poorer Countries Became the World’s Dumping Grounds

A new book shows how residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing the health and safety of other parts of the planet.

Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.[Read: What America owes the planet]Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.

Chemicals
Climate
Conservation

There Are Fewer Than 100 Ocelots in the US - These Scientists Are Trying to Save Them

By Evan GarciaCORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (Reuters) - In the race to save the endangered ocelot, scientists are trekking the United States, pursuing...

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (Reuters) - In the race to save the endangered ocelot, scientists are trekking the United States, pursuing fertility treatments and striving to kickstart a new generation of the wild cat.Ocelots roamed the southwestern U.S. in the 1800s, but have since dwindled to fewer than 100 in two small breeding populations in South Texas. While the feline species is found in Mexico, Central America and South America, the Texas cats with striking spotted coats are believed to be the last wild population in the United States.   "Just look at the cat – why would you not want that animal to survive in nature?" said Bill Swanson, the Cincinnati Zoo's director of animal research, who has traveled the country trying to breed captive ocelots in animal institutions with sperm from wild ocelots from South Texas ranch land."It's not just saving the ocelot, it's saving the habitat and the ecosystem where it lives, which supports so many other animals that provide those services that let people survive on this planet," he said,  The nonprofit East Foundation, based in San Antonio, manages one of those breeding populations on more than 200,000 acres (810 sq km) of South Texas ranch land containing thorn scrub habitat, a dense covering of short, spiky shrubs that the elusive and nocturnal ocelots adore.Ashley Reeves, a research veterinarian at the East Foundation, said humans played a major role in the decline of the ocelot, listed in 1982 as an endangered species in the U.S."Back when the fur trade became very popular, they were hunted down for their beautiful fur," Reeves said. "And then also loss of habitat, human encroachment, large cities being built and roadways, so roadways are one of their No. 1 killers today."Reeves and Swanson have been working on their ocelot project since 2021. The team has tried - unsuccessfully so far - to breed ocelots two ways. The first is via artificial insemination, in which semen collected from a cat is deposited directly into a female cat's reproductive tract. The second is in vitro fertilization, in which oocytes, or eggs, are collected from the female cat's body and fertilized with semen in a petri dish before developing into an embryo in an incubator. The viable embryo is then surgically transferred into a cat or frozen to be transferred later. Of the 13 artificial inseminations and four in vitro fertilization procedures performed in recent years, none have produced a viable pregnancy.Swanson points to decreased quality in wild ocelot sperm due to signs of inbreeding, environmental stresses like dehydration from drought and decreased motility - the ability of sperm to move - from freezing specimens. "An ocelot usually has one kitten. That's the normal litter size," Swanson said. "And in the wild, the mother will raise that kitten for a full year until it's old enough to go out on its own. So ocelots are very slowly reproducing animals naturally."    At the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi, Texas, in December, the team extracted two eggs from a five-year-old ocelot named Milla and patiently waited to see if an embryo would form after combining the eggs with wild sperm in a petri dish. After two days of waiting for a fertilized egg to cleave, or rapidly divide and develop into an embryo, the researchers were disappointed to find neither cell cleaved."It's disappointing," Reeves said. "But at the same time, science doesn't always go the way you expect it to."    Researchers will spend the next few months trapping wild male ocelots to collect their sperm before resuming fertility procedures in the fall.     By the end of the year, a facility in Kingsville, Texas, will be constructed to house ocelots, provide medical and reproductive care as well as a setting for young ocelots to learn how to hunt in the wild.(Reporting by Evan Garcia in Texas; Writing by Brad Brooks; Editing by Donna Bryson and Sandra Maler)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

Animals
Nature
Science

Farmers Put Plans, Investments on Hold Under Trump USDA Spending Freeze

By P.J. Huffstutter, Leah Douglas and Tom PolansekCHICAGO/WASHINGTON - Nate Powell-Palm, an organic farmer outside Belgrade, Montana, was relying...

By P.J. Huffstutter, Leah Douglas and Tom PolansekCHICAGO/WASHINGTON - Nate Powell-Palm, an organic farmer outside Belgrade, Montana, was relying on a $648,000 grant from USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service to help build a feed mill - an economic lifeline for about 150 area organic grain farmers.But construction is on hold following the Trump Administration's freeze on some agricultural grants and loans as it conducts a broad review of federal spending.Now, about 500 tons of baled alfalfa sits untouched in stacks in his fields, and a bill from a Colorado equipment manufacturer is past due. Last week, he traveled with a group of farmers to Washington, D.C. to meet with lawmakers and try to get their frozen USDA grant funding released.Farmers and food organizations across the country are cutting staff, halting investments and missing key funding amid a USDA freeze on a broad swath of grants, more than two dozen farmers and agricultural support groups in seven states told Reuters. All this comes as Trump has imposed new tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China, sparking trade wars with the biggest buyers of U.S. farm products. Trump on March 6 said he would exempt farm products like potash fertilizer from the tariffs until April 2. But if they eventually go into effect, the tariffs would hurt the $191 billion American agricultural export sector, raise costs for farmers struggling with low crop prices and send consumer grocery prices higher, farm groups warn."As the president said, farmers need to start growing crops to sell here in the U.S.," Powell-Palm said, referencing a March 3 post by Trump on his Truth Social website in which Trump said farmers should prepare to sell more domestic product. "This is what we are trying to do. We just need our approved grant funding to be released."Trump has historically enjoyed widespread support across the U.S. Farm Belt, where he won most states in the November election. But recent actions - like a freeze on most humanitarian aid and a broad review of federal spending that paused disbursements - have disrupted some agricultural markets and caused stress and confusion in farm country. For example, some agricultural production lines have been halted. Two farmers, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive personal financial matters, told Reuters they were weeks away from being forced to file for bankruptcy because of the USDA freeze.White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said the administration is making agencies more efficient, including to better serve farmers.A USDA spokesperson said the administration is reviewing the frozen programs.Though the U.S. farm sector previously faced sweeping trade wars under Trump, many have remained loyal even as his policies and tariffs damaged American farm sales and resulted in lost global market share that soybean growers still haven’t recovered. But many farmers last fall believed they were so politically important to Trump winning back the White House, that he would help cover their financial losses.After all, it happened before. Under the first Trump administration, farmers received about $217 billion in farm payments, including crop support, disaster, and aid programs - more than in any prior four-year period since 1933, according to a Reuters examination of USDA data. Adjusted for inflation, the only period with more spending on farmers was 1984 to 1988, when a farm economic crisis battered rural America.Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins has said USDA is considering direct payments to farmers again if trade wars lead to farm losses.Currently, the USDA administers hundreds of programs that support the agriculture sector, either through grants and loans, or direct payments and other subsidies. From financial assistance programs alone, U.S. farmers and ranchers received $161 billion from USDA between fiscal years 2019 through 2023, according to a December report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.Several of the grant recipients interviewed by Reuters said their money came from former President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which provided more than $20 billion for farm and forestry conservation programs.Trump froze IRA disbursements in his first days in office, though the White House said on January 22 that the freeze only applied to clean energy projects.Rollins said on February 20 that the agency is beginning to unfreeze some IRA money for farmers, but the scope of the release is unclear. The USDA did not comment on how much money has been released from IRA or other funding sources. The White House did not respond to questions about under what authority the funds are frozen or when they may be released.The full scope of economic impact on farmers is not known.Two federal judges have blocked Trump from issuing broad freezes of federal spending.'YOUR WORD MEANS SOMETHING'Many farmers are worried they won't be spared from Trump's government downsizing. Seeking answers, farmers have called their Congressional representatives and local contacts at field USDA offices. Sometimes, the calls were answered. Sometimes, not.Dave Walton, a row crop farmer in Muscatine County, Iowa, said farmers had expected Trump's administration to improve the federal safety net, not slash it."In farming, your word means something. If you sign a contract, that means something," said Walton, who said he's waiting on $6,000 from a USDA-funded program for climate-friendly farming.Grain farmer Steve Tucker was awarded a $400,000 grant through Agricultural Marketing Service, which promotes domestic and foreign farm markets, to build a mill in southwest Nebraska.He had planned to grind this year's sorghum crop into flour and sell it to U.S. snack manufacturers, but now that's on hold.The broader grant freeze has also affected some farmers' customers. Ed and Becky Morgan scrimped for years to grow their livestock herd as demand for their sausage varieties boomed, thanks to local public schools hungry for lunchtime links.But the fate of USDA grants that help schools buy foodstuffs from local farmers - like the Morgans' flavored sausages - remains uncertain, said Spencer Moss, the executive director of the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition in Charleston, West Virginia.Some of the frozen USDA money is linked to soil and water conservation, organic and local food, regional and rural food systems, and minority and women farmers, according to Reuters interviews with farmers and farm organizations.Food and farm groups with grants unrelated to conservation also told Reuters they were not receiving promised funds.The West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition received about 80% of its funding from federal sources, including USDA nutrition programs that help low-income consumers buy more produce, Moss said.The group, which works with local farmers markets and provides technical assistance to farmers, said it was still waiting for guidance from the USDA on its invoices, Moss said. The group has been paid for some grant-related invoices, but has been told it won't - at least for now - be paid for expenses incurred after January 19, after Trump took office."We've made promises to our farmers, because the federal government signed contracts with us," Moss said.Farmers have also been affected by spending freezes at other agencies, like USAID, which support programs that buy bulk farm commodities.At the State Department, the Trump administration has said it would release less than $100 million of the roughly $40 billion in USAID programs administered annually before the freeze, according to a list of exemptions reviewed by Reuters. The Supreme Court on March 5 ruled that the administration cannot withhold payments to aid groups for work already performed.The freeze has exacerbated pain felt by farmers under pressure from low grain prices. The number of U.S. farm bankruptcy filings jumped 55% in 2024, compared to a year earlier, according to the latest United States Court data.Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government, said the group was working with about 100 grantees who are impacted by the USDA spending freeze."You need to have certainty if you’re going into business with the federal government," she said.(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Shanks, West Virginina, and Washington D.C., and P.J. Huffstutter and Tom Polansek in Chicago. Editing by Emily Schmall and Anna Driver)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

Agriculture
Business
Climate

We’re facing a ‘forever chemicals’ crisis. We must stop Pfas at the source

Pfas are poisoning our soil and polluting our lungs. The EPA is finally sounding the alarm – but that’s not enoughSeveral years ago, I made a movie called Dark Waters, which told the real-life story of a community in West Virginia poisoned by Pfas “forever chemicals”. DuPont – a chemical manufacturing plant – contaminated the local water supply, killing cows and wildlife, making its workers sick and exposing local residents to toxic chemicals. It was an environmental horror story.It’s still happening across the country. Continue reading...

Several years ago, I made a movie called Dark Waters, which told the real-life story of a community in West Virginia poisoned by Pfas “forever chemicals”. DuPont – a chemical manufacturing plant – contaminated the local water supply, killing cows and wildlife, making its workers sick and exposing local residents to toxic chemicals. It was an environmental horror story.It’s still happening across the country.Pfas, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, aren’t just lingering in that community – they’re everywhere. In our air, soil, water and bodies. They’re called “forever chemicals” for a reason: they don’t break down, and once they’re in our bodies, they’re almost impossible to get rid of.We now know that repeated ingestion of and exposure to Pfas have been linked to cancer, birth defects, developmental and reproductive disorders and weakened immune systems. Studies show they can cause kidney and testicular cancer in adults and interfere with childhood growth and behavior.Sludge seeps into the soil, contaminates groundwater and ends up in our foodYet, despite knowing the risks, the federal government – through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – has actually encouraged farmers to spread sewage sludge contaminated with Pfas across cropland and pastures (as the New York Times has reported in multiple stories). This sludge, a byproduct of wastewater treatment, seeps into the soil, contaminates groundwater and ends up in our food. And from there? It ends up in us.Once that sewage sludge exists, it exists forever – “disposal” methods such as sending sludge to a landfill or burning it release even more dangerous chemicals into the air. We’re either poisoning our soil or polluting our lungs – there is no winning.The problem is so severe that even the EPA, which once promoted these disposal methods, is now sounding the alarm. But sounding the alarm isn’t enough. We need action. We need regulations that put people’s health above corporate convenience. And we need them now, before forever chemicals cause even more damage – damage that can never be undone.A national problem with local consequencesThe year Dark Waters was released, 2019, many of us testified before Congress, urging lawmakers to take action on Pfas contamination. At the time, my testimony focused on what had happened in West Virginia. But this isn’t just West Virginia’s story. It’s happening all over the country, and it’s affecting all of us. Every single person in America has elevated Pfas in their body. They accumulate there. There are explosions of Pfas-related diseases happening in our communities.One example is Manchester, New Hampshire, where a wastewater treatment plant burns sewage sludge just steps from homes, an elementary school, a baseball field and the Merrimack River. It’s the only facility in the state with a sludge incinerator, and in 2018 alone, it burned more than 4,000 dry metric tons of it. That’s happening just two miles from neighborhoods already struggling with high levels of toxic air pollution.‘Dark Waters [seen here in a still image] was meant to be a cautionary tale. Instead, it has become the future we keep choosing.’ Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/AlamyManchester isn’t an outlier. As of May 2023, there were 86 sewage sludge incineration facilities operating across the country, with 170 incineration units spread across 24 states and Puerto Rico. Most of them are concentrated in the eastern US, particularly in New York, Ohio and New Jersey.This is our reality: we are burning toxic waste near where people live, work and go to school. And with every ton of sludge that goes up in smoke, we’re making the problem worse.Solutions at the sourceSome may frame incineration as a better solution to the disposal of sludge, compared with spreading that sludge over land. But that’s a false choice – and a dangerous one. In our interconnected world, you can’t just burn harmful chemicals and expect them to disappear. They don’t. They resurface elsewhere, often with even worse consequences.The only real solution is to stop creating these chemicals in the first place. We need to reduce the manufacturing and use of Pfas entirely. This is the most economical way of dealing with this “forever chemical” class. That means ending industrial releases of Pfas into our air and water, eliminating their unnecessary presence in everyday products like food packaging, filtering them out of drinking water and cleaning up the contamination they’ve already left behind. If we stop Pfas at the source, fewer of these toxic substances will end up in wastewater treatment plants, where they currently pile up in sludge that gets spread on farmlands, burned in incinerators or dumped in landfills.Despite overwhelming evidence of the health risks, the EPA has been slow to act. Right now, it has a critical opportunity.Through a proposed Clean Water Act permit for Manchester, New Hampshire, the EPA can take meaningful steps to curb industrial Pfas pollution at its source – steps that could be replicated nationwide. The EPA’s own report confirms that reducing Pfas from industrial wastewater means less contamination in sludge. It has even recommended that Clean Water Act permits include best management practices, like phasing out Pfas products. Yet the current draft permit for Manchester, remarkably, contains no such requirement.Clean Water Act permits protect our nation’s waters from toxic pollution. Renewing Manchester’s permit with stronger protections will curb PFAS entering the facility and their eventual release into the air we breathe and water we drink.Dark Waters was meant to be a cautionary tale; instead, it has become the future we keep choosing, at the cost of our health, our environment, and the lives of our loved ones. The EPA has a chance to send a clear message: we can no longer allow industries to pump toxic chemicals into our communities. We need the agency to lead on PFAS reduction. And we need it to act now. Mark Ruffalo is an award-winning actor and environmental activist, known for his roles in Spotlight and the Avengers films, as well as his advocacy for clean water and renewable energy through organizations including The Solutions Project

Chemicals
Water
Energy

What Kind of Workout Clothes Are Best for the Environment?

Every fabric has an environmental cost. Here’s how to make informed choices.

Chances are, your favorite exercise attire is synthetic, made from petroleum-based fibers like nylon, spandex and polyester. Materials that don’t exactly scream “climate friendly.”Natural fibers have issues, too: Growing cotton can use huge amounts of water and pesticides, the sheep that give us wool emit methane, and processing bamboo can produce a lot of pollution. Altogether, the apparel and footwear industries account for more than 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.So if you want to keep your body fit while also keeping the planet healthy, what should you do?Consider recycled fibersThere’s a lot of plastic polluting our lands and waters. Some companies have capitalized on that, melting down plastic waste and extruding it into yarn.Karen Leonas, a professor of textile sciences at North Carolina State University, said those materials could be a good choice for workout clothes.“Any time you can find something that contains recycled fibers, that’s definitely a plus,” she said. “Whether you’re looking at climate, water, solid waste or even social sustainability issues.”Lewis Perkins, president of the nonprofit Apparel Impact Institute, also said he liked recycled fibers. But he cautioned that they’re a “transitional solution,” as he believes the ultimate goal should be reducing the prevalence of single-use plastic in the first place.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Climate
Health
Pollution

In Canada, Indigenous advocates argue mining companies violate the rights of nature

In Western legal systems, arguments against pollution or the destruction of the environment tend to focus exclusively on people: It’s wrong to contaminate a river, for example, because certain humans depend on the river for drinking water. But what if the river had an inherent right to be protected from pollution, regardless of its utility […]

In Western legal systems, arguments against pollution or the destruction of the environment tend to focus exclusively on people: It’s wrong to contaminate a river, for example, because certain humans depend on the river for drinking water. But what if the river had an inherent right to be protected from pollution, regardless of its utility to humans? This is the idea that drives the “rights of nature” movement, a global campaign to recognize the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature — not just rivers, but also trees, mountains, animals, ecosystems — by granting it legal rights. Many Indigenous worldviews already recognize these rights. The question for many in the movement, however, is how to bring the rights of nature into the courtroom. Enter the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, a recurring gathering of Indigenous and environmental advocates who present arguments regarding alleged violations of the rights of nature and Indigenous peoples. Given international law’s broad failure to recognize the rights of nature, the events provide a model showing what this type of jurisprudence could look like.  At the sixth tribunal in Toronto late last month, a panel of nine judges heard cases against Canadian mining companies, ultimately ruling that they had violated “collective rights, Indigenous rights, and rights of nature.” “Today’s testimonies have emphasized the age-old stories of greed, colonization, … and the ongoing ecocide caused by the extractive industries,” said Casey Camp-Horinek, an elder of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma and one of the tribunal’s judges. She and the other judges called for the ratification of a United Nations treaty on business and human rights, a report from U.N. experts on critical minerals and Indigenous peoples’ rights, and further consideration of mining’s impacts at the U.N.’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.  Those recommendations and the verdict against the mining companies are set to be presented later this year at COP30 in Brazil — the United Nations’ annual climate change conference — where the tribunal judges hope their findings will pressure countries to develop legal protections for nature and Indigenous peoples. Mining was selected as the theme of this tribunal because of the damage that resource extraction can cause to people and ecosystems, even though the sector is necessary for addressing climate change. Minerals like lithium and copper are needed in large quantities for electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and other renewable technologies to replace fossil fuels. A previous session of the tribunal, held in New York City last September, focused on oil and gas infrastructure.  Canadian companies were singled out because of their prominence in the global mining sector. According to a recent report by the nonprofit MiningWatch Canada, the country is home to more than 1,300 mining and exploration companies, 730 of which operate overseas. About half of the world’s public mining companies are listed on Canadian stock exchanges. Casey Camp-Horinek, International Rights of Nature tribunal judge and Ponca Nation of Oklahoma elder, reveals Canadian mining companies are violating the rights of both nature and Indigenous peoples in South America and Serbia. Courtesy of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature The tribunal was also meant to contrast with this week’s annual conference of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, which featured climate change and Indigenous issues in a way that speakers described as opportunistic — by now a familiar criticism.  James Yap, the tribunal’s prosecutor and acting director of an international human rights program at the University of Toronto, called out one particular event titled “Caliente Caliente Ooh Aah: Latin American Mining is Heating Up!,” which invited attendees to “dance to the Latin beat through the various regulatory issues affecting the region.”  Neither the law firm that organized the Latin American mining event nor the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada responded to Grist’s requests for comment. Read Next UN report backs up Sámi claims that mining in Finland violates their rights to land and culture Tristan Ahtone Jérémie Gilbert, a professor of social and ecological justice at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, applauded the tribunal for building an evidence base of the alleged human rights and nature’s rights violations by transnational mining companies. His research has highlighted how most international law treats nature as a resource to be owned or exploited, instead of having value in its own right. Legal protections that include Indigenous knowledge and the rights of nature have already been implemented in several countries — most famously in Ecuador, which in its rewritten 2008 constitution acknowledged the rights of Mother Earth, or Pacha Mama, to the “maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”  “What’s required for the rights of nature is a pen and then enforceability,” said Dov Korff-Korn, the legal director of Sacred Defense Fund, an Indigenous environmental group based in Santa Fe. Korff-Korn said that giving rights to nonhuman entities like water, animals, and plants is already baked into how many tribes see the world, so using tribal laws and respecting sovereignty is a way forward.  “We’ve got some unique rights and laws that have unique expressions,” said Frank Bibeau, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe and a tribal attorney with the nonprofit Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights who has worked on cases that give rights to nonhuman relatives under Chippewa treaties.  A copper mine in Puerto Coloso, Chile. Sebastian Rojas Rojo / AFP via Getty Images One example came during the fight against the controversial Line 3 Pipeline proposed by the oil and gas company Enbridge in Minnesota. Bibeau listed manoomin, Ojibwe for wild rice, as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, arguing that the rice had rights to clean water and habitat that would be jeopardized by the pipeline and the oil spill risks it would bring. Bibeau said the lawsuit is an example of how many tribes see the rights inherent in nature. But since most settler courts don’t, he argues that Indigenous treaties are a useful way to help protect nonhuman relatives.  Other ways to develop legal protections could involve tribal courts. And this year in Aotearoa, or New Zealand, the mountain Taranaki Maunga was recognized as a legal person because the Maori see it as an ancestor. The country also recognizes the rights of the Te Irewera Forest and the Whanganui River, so there is a developing global precedent for this sort of legal framework.  Protections like these could protect ecosystems in the examined cases of the tribunal, including in Brazil where a firm called Belo Sun has proposed the development of the country’s largest open-pit gold mine, and in regions affected by copper, silver, and other metals mining throughout Ecuador. One of the cases heard by tribunal judges related to a gold mine proposed in eastern Serbia by the Canadian company Dundee Precious Metals, and another centered on uranium mining within Canada.  In a presentation about heavy metals mining in Penco, Chile, Valerie Sepúlveda — president of a Chilean environmental nonprofit called Parque para Penco — criticized the Toronto-based Aclara Resources for opaque operations and a failure to engage with residents near its mines. “We must reevaluate what mining is really necessary and which is not,” she told the audience. One of the judges, in describing the 2015 release of millions of liters of cyanide solution from a gold mine in San Juan, Argentina, said mining companies are “sacrificing these towns so that Americans can have their Teslas.”  Another judge — Tzeporah Berman, international program director at the nonprofit Stand.earth — told attendees she was “horrified and embarrassed” by the practices of Canadian mining companies. “Canada must pursue human and environmental due diligence,” she added while delivering her verdict. “I hope that our recommendations will be used in future policy design and legal challenges.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Canada, Indigenous advocates argue mining companies violate the rights of nature on Mar 10, 2025.

Indigenous
Nature
Pollution

UK government vows to clean up Windermere after sewage criticism

Environment secretary points to measures to stop lake being ‘choked by unacceptable levels’ of pollutionThe government has said it will “clean up Windermere” after criticism over the volume of sewage being pumped into England’s largest lake.The environment secretary, Steve Reed, pledged “only rainwater” would enter the famous body of water in the Lake District, putting an end to the situation where it Windermere was being “choked by unacceptable levels of sewage pollution”. Continue reading...

The government has said it will “clean up Windermere” after criticism over the volume of sewage being pumped into England’s largest lake.The environment secretary, Steve Reed, pledged “only rainwater” would enter the famous body of water in the Lake District, putting an end to the situation where it Windermere was being “choked by unacceptable levels of sewage pollution”.Reed highlighted a range of measures being put in place, including investment from the water company United Utilities. The company, which has been a major polluter of the Unesco world heritage site, recently conceded defeat in its legal efforts to block the public from accessing data related to how much sewage it was dumping into the lake.United Utilities had argued that information on how much phosphorus was being detected at a main sewage treatment works on Windermere did not fall into publicly accessible environmental information.On top of legal discharges made by the company into the important habitat, various investigations have found it also illegally dumped millions of litres of raw sewage into the watercourse.Reed and the water minister, Emma Hardy, will be in Windermere on Monday as part of a “Things Can Only Get Cleaner” tour, to see where investment in water infrastructure will underpin the building of new homes, create jobs and bolster local economies.Reed said: “Windermere is a stunningly beautiful national treasure – but it’s being choked by unacceptable levels of sewage pollution.”He added that the government was “committed to cleaning up this iconic lake” as part of its Plan for Change scheme to upgrade the crumbling water infrastructure and increase economic growth using more than £100bn of private investment.The government was also working “to stop all sewage going into the lake and restore it to its natural beauty”, Reed added.Local groups and organisations have set up a feasibility study to look into what is needed to eliminate sewage discharges into Windermere and draw on successful examples and innovation from around the world.The study has been set up by a coalition that includes United Utilities, the Environment Agency, Ofwat, Save Windermere, Love Windermere, the Lake District national park authority and Westmorland and Furness council.A £200 investment from United Utilities will go towards upgrading 10 wastewater treatment works at Windermere and reducing spills from four storm overflows discharging into the lake to two a year by 2030. Upgrades to the remaining two storm overflows are due from around 2030-35.The private sector money will go towards sewage pipes, water treatment works and nine reservoirs, supporting 1.5 m new homes, 150 large infrastructure projects and power industries such as gigafactories and datacentres.Money from water company fines and penalties has been ringfenced to deliver local water projects, and schemes to clean up waterways are to get up to £11m.Windermere is home to more than 14,000 people and its scenery, rare species and cultural heritage attract seven million visitors a year, generating £750m for the local economy.

Government
Pollution
Water

Elderly and suffer from hoarding disorder? Support groups fight stigma, isolation

Clutter creates physical risks. A cramped and disorderly home is especially dangerous for older adults because the risk of falling and breaking a bone increases with age. And having too many things in one space can be a fire hazard.

A dozen people seated around folding tables clap heartily for a beaming woman: She’s donated two 13-gallon garbage bags full of clothes, including several Christmas sweaters and a couple of pantsuits, to a Presbyterian church.A closet cleanout might not seem a significant accomplishment. But as the people in this Sunday-night class can attest, getting rid of stuff is agonizing for those with hoarding disorder.People with the diagnosis accumulate an excessive volume of things such as household goods, craft supplies, even pets. In extreme cases, their homes become so crammed that moving between rooms is possible only via narrow pathways.These unsafe conditions can also lead to strained relationships.“I’ve had a few relatives and friends that have condemned me, and it doesn’t help,” said Bernadette, a Pennsylvania woman in her early 70s who has struggled with hoarding since retiring and no longer allows guests in her home.This article is from a partnership that includes Spotlight PA, NPR, and KFF Health News. People who hoard are often stigmatized as lazy or dirty. NPR, Spotlight PA and KFF Health News agreed to use only the first names of people with hoarding disorder interviewed for this article because they fear personal and professional repercussions if their condition is made public.As Baby Boomers age into the group most affected by hoarding disorder, the psychiatric condition is a growing public health concern. Effective treatments are scarce. And because hoarding can require expensive interventions that drain municipal resources, more funding and expertise is needed to support those with the diagnosis before the issue grows into a crisis.For Bernadette, the 16-week course is helping her turn over a new leaf.The program doubles as a support group and is provided through Fight the Blight. The Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, organization started offering the course at a local Masonic temple after founder Matt Williams realized the area lacked hoarding-specific mental health services.Fight the Blight uses a curriculum based on cognitive behavioral therapy to help participants build awareness of what fuels their hoarding. People learn to be more thoughtful about what they purchase and save, and they create strategies so that decluttering doesn’t become overwhelming.Perhaps more important, attendees say they’ve formed a community knitted together through the shared experience of a psychiatric illness that comes with high rates of social isolation and depression.“You get friendship,” said Sanford, a classmate of Bernadette’s.After a lifetime of judgment, these friendships have become an integral part of the changes that might help participants eventually clear out the clutter.Clutter catches up to Baby BoomersStudies have estimated that hoarding disorder affects around 2.5% of the general population — a higher rate than schizophrenia.The mental illness was previously considered a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in 2013 it was given its own diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5.The biological and environmental factors that may drive hoarding are not well understood. Symptoms usually appear during the teenage years and tend to be more severe among older adults with the disorder. That’s partly because they have had more time to acquire things, said Kiara Timpano, a University of Miami psychology professor.“All of a sudden you have to downsize this huge home with all the stuff and so it puts pressures on individuals,” she said. In Bernadette’s case, her clutter includes a collection of VHS tapes, and spices in her kitchen that she said date back to the Clinton administration.But it’s more than just having decades to stockpile possessions; the urge to accumulate strengthens with age, according to Catherine Ayers, a psychiatry professor at the University of California-San Diego.Researchers are working to discern why. Ayers and Timpano theorize that age-related cognitive changes — particularly in the frontal lobe, which regulates impulsivity and problem-solving — might exacerbate the disorder.“It is the only mental health disorder, besides dementia, that increases in prevalence and severity with age,” Ayers said.Tristen Williams helps remove clutter from the home of someone with hoarding disorder in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The homeowner asked for help with the cleanout after attending a course and support group offered by the nonprofit Fight the Blight, founded by Williams' father. (Matt Williams/Fight the Blight)Matt Williams/Fight the BlightAs the U.S. population ages, hoarding presents a growing public health concern: Some 1 in 5 U.S. residents are Baby Boomers, all of whom will be 65 or older by 2030.This population shift will require the federal government to address hoarding disorder, among other age-related issues that it has not previously prioritized, according to a July report by the Democratic staff of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, chaired then by former Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa..Health hazards of hoardingClutter creates physical risks. A cramped and disorderly home is especially dangerous for older adults because the risk of falling and breaking a bone increases with age. And having too many things in one space can be a fire hazard.Last year, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation wrote to the Senate committee’s leadership that “hoarding conditions are among the most dangerous conditions the fire service can encounter.” The group also said that cluttered homes delay emergency care and increase the likelihood of a first responder being injured on a call.The Bucks County Board of Commissioners in Pennsylvania told Casey that hoarding-related mold and insects can spread to adjacent households, endangering the health of neighbors.Due to these safety concerns, it might be tempting for a family member or public health agency to quickly empty someone’s home in one fell swoop.That can backfire, Timpano said, as it fails to address people’s underlying issues and can be traumatic.“It can really disrupt the trust and make it even less likely that the individual is willing to seek help in the future,” she said.It’s more effective, Timpano said, to help people build internal motivation to change and help them identify goals to manage their hoarding.For example, at the Fight the Blight class, a woman named Diane told the group she wanted a cleaner home so she could invite people over and not feel embarrassed.Sanford said he is learning to keep his documents and record collection more organized.Bernadette wants to declutter her bedroom so she can start sleeping in it again. Also, she’s glad she cleared enough space on the first floor for her cat to play.“Because now he’s got all this room,” she said, “he goes after his tail like a crazy person.”Ultimately, the home of someone with hoarding disorder might always be a bit cluttered, and that’s OK. The goal of treatment is to make the space healthy and safe, Timpano said, not to earn Marie Kondo’s approval.Lack of treatment leaves few optionsA 2020 study found that hoarding correlates with homelessness, and those with the disorder are more likely to be evicted.Housing advocates argue that under the Fair Housing Act, tenants with the diagnosis are entitled to reasonable accommodation. This might include allowing someone time to declutter a home and seek therapy before forcing them to leave their home.But as outlined in the Senate aging committee’s report, a lack of resources limits efforts to carry out these accommodations.Hoarding is difficult to treat. In a 2018 study led by Ayers, the UCSD psychiatrist, researchers found that people coping with hoarding need to be highly motivated and often require substantial support to remain engaged with their therapy.The challenge of sticking with a treatment plan is exacerbated by a shortage of clinicians with necessary expertise, said Janet Spinelli, the co-chair of Rhode Island’s hoarding task force.Could changes to federal policy help?Casey, the former Pennsylvania senator, advocated for more education and technical assistance for hoarding disorder.In September, he called for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to develop training, assistance, and guidance for communities and clinicians. He also said the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services should explore ways to cover evidence-based treatments and services for hoarding.This might include increased Medicare funding for mobile crisis services to go to people’s homes, which is one way to connect someone to therapy, Spinelli said.Another strategy would involve allowing Medicaid and Medicare to reimburse community health workers who assist patients with light cleaning and organizing; research has found that many who hoard struggle with categorization tasks.Williams, of Fight the Blight, agrees that in addition to more mental health support, taxpayer-funded services are needed to help people address their clutter.When someone in the group reaches a point of wanting to declutter their home, Fight the Blight helps them start the process of cleaning, removing, and organizing.The service is free to those earning less than 150% of the federal poverty level. People making above that threshold can pay for assistance on a sliding scale; the cost varies also depending on the size of a property and severity of the hoarding.Also, Spinelli thinks Medicaid and Medicare should fund more peer-support specialists for hoarding disorder. These mental health workers draw on their own life experiences to help people with similar diagnoses. For example, peer counselors could lead classes like Fight the Blight’s.Bernadette and Sanford say courses like the one they enrolled in should be available all over the U.S.To those just starting to address their own hoarding, Sanford advises patience and persistence.“Even if it’s a little job here, a little job there,” he said, “that all adds up.”This article is from a partnership that includes Spotlight PA, NPR, and KFF Health News.Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan, and nonprofit newsroom producing investigative and public-service journalism that holds power to account and drives positive change in Pennsylvania. Sign up for its free newsletters.

Crisis
Education
Government

Environmental NGO Sues Trump's EPA, Citibank Over Funding Freeze

By Rich McKay(Reuters) -An environmental nonprofit sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Citibank on Saturday, seeking billions of...

By Rich McKay(Reuters) -An environmental nonprofit sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Citibank on Saturday, seeking billions of...

L.A. fires put new drinking-water safety measures to the test

When scientists found a carcinogen in Santa Rosa's drinking water after the Tubbs fire, it triggered a race to develop measures to keep residents safe. The L.A. fires put them to the test.

A month after the 2017 Tubbs fire, a Santa Rosa resident finally returned home to one of the handful of houses still standing amid a field of destruction. They turned on their kitchen faucet and smelled gasoline.It was an immediate red flag for Santa Rosa Water, which quickly sent over technicians to test the tap. In the water, they found benzene, a known carcinogen — a discovery that sent shockwaves through the scientific and water safety world.In Santa Rosa, the contamination investigation would expand from a single household to the entire burn area. The neighborhood of Coffey Park is leveled in October 2017 after the Tubbs fire swept through Santa Rosa. (Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press) As devastating urban wildfires continued to increase in frequency in the American West, the problem would reappear — in Paradise, Calif.; in Colorado; in Hawaii; and finally in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades and Altadena. All the while, scientists, regulators and local utilities raced to figure out what was happening and how to keep residents safe.By the time the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out, scientists and the state could hand the affected utilities a playbook on how to restore safe water for their customers. The lessons learned helped the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which serves the Pacific Palisades, restore safe drinking water to all its customers just two months after the fires erupted — compared to an entire year in Santa Rosa.Yet, the Altadena utilities are still fighting to restore safe water. And, as with the Tubbs fire, the recovery has still been tinged with persisting scientific debates and uncomfortable unknowns.“We are in a sort of brave new world as we shift into this reality of increasingly more urban wildfires,” said Edith de Guzman, who researches water equity and climate adaptation policy at UCLA. “We have impacts that we’re not really even sure how to measure or monitor.”Benzene wasn’t the only contaminant in Santa Rosa’s and L.A.’s postfire water. Scientists are still debating which chemicals utilities ought to test for and which, given the costly and timely process of analyzing for dozens of chemicals, can go unchecked.And, while scientists have studied the danger of long-term exposure to trace amounts of contaminants like benzene in drinking water, less is known about the short-term risks of high exposures through day-to-day activities like showering and running the dish washer.The dangers of benzeneAfter the smoke settled in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, the local water utilities quickly issued “do not drink” and “do not boil” orders, under the advice of the state regulator — the State Water Resources Control Board’s Division of Drinking Water. Workers with the U.S Army Corps of Engineers clear debris from a house in Altadena after the Eaton fire. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The orders are designed to limit dangerous exposures to benzene, found in everything from plastic to treated construction wood to wildfire smoke. Over decades, drinking or breathing it in can increase the risk of developing leukemia and other blood cancers.While boiling water can kill off the typical non-fire contamination suspects, pathogens, it doesn’t work for benzene. And, with a lower boiling point than water, benzene can easily enter the air when water is heated up.Consequently, the state has developed best practices to keep residents safe, including not only avoiding drinking or boiling the water, but also avoiding hot showers, hot tubs and clothes dryers.However, scientists warn that these recommendations are not yet based on any comprehensive science. Reams of research link long-term small exposures of the contaminant to cancer risk. Few studies explore the potentials of short, intense household exposures.“Right now, there’s no chemical modeling, mathematical modeling or any exposure assessments that have been conducted to determine the answers to [these] questions,” said Andrew Whelton, a professor of civil environmental engineering at Purdue University and a leading researcher in the field of postfire water safety.In California, while the maximum allowed level of benzene in drinking water is 1 part per billion, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment says the concentration needs to be as low as 0.15 ppb to confidently say there will be no long-term chronic health effects. For the short-term, the Environmental Protection Agency deems exposure to over 200 ppb for longer than one day dangerous.In the aftermath of the recent fires, utilities in L.A. County have found levels as high as 190 ppb in Altadena and 71.3 ppb in the Palisades. However, after the Tubbs fire, Santa Rosa found levels as high as 40,000 ppb.After Santa Rosa Water first tested its customer’s kitchen faucet, the utility, along with the Division of Drinking Water and the EPA, launched a full investigation into the contamination of the drinking water of the affected area, and the results were unlike anything that had been seen before. A fire hose lies abandonded in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs fire in October 2017. (Jonathan Copper / Associated Press) “We did a lot of research in the start to see if any other agency had experienced this,” said Jennifer Burke, director of Santa Rosa Water. “We did not find anything anywhere.”What Santa Rosa Water found — not in the literature, but in its own backyard — was that a whole range of potentially dangerous chemicals lurked in the water. The discovery has helped guide post-wildfire recovery since.The other toxinsSanta Rosa Water first tried to figure out how a contaminant like benzene could’ve entered the water. The utility looked into whether nearby underground gasoline storage facilities could’ve been compromised, or if benzene was present in the soil, but found no compelling evidence. Then, a hypothesis emerged that would later be borne out in the lab and testing data from water systems postfire across the West.Parts of Santa Rosa’s water system had lost pressure during the blaze as firefighters tapped into hydrants, residents ran hoses to protect their properties and damaged connections spewed water into the street. As the water level dropped, leaving higher elevations dry, it created a void in the system. To fill the pressure void, experts theorized, the open connections began to suck toxic ash, soot and smoke into the pipes.It meant the contamination had the potential to quickly spread far beyond one home. And wildfire smoke carries much more than just benzene. In it is every household toxic chemical that could’ve burned. It’s a reality that poses a daunting task for scientists and utilities.“We’re chasing after a growing and an increasingly complex reality of living in the modern world, where we’re creating all of these new chemicals all the time,” de Guzman said.Among the complex sea of chemicals scattered through postfire burn areas, water safety experts have settled on a few groups of the most concerning contaminants based on their risks to humans and their presence in the Tubbs and Camp fires in California, the Marshall fire in Colorado and the Maui fires in Hawaii. The remains of a home destroyed by the Marshall fire in Louisville, Colo., in 2022. (Jack Dempsey / Associated Press) During previous fires, some experts argued testing for benzene alone is sufficient, saying the chemical, which time and time again has exceeded safe levels most often in postfire systems, acts as a good “indicator” for whether other chemicals may be present.However, with mounting evidence of other contaminants lurking in water systems postfire, even without benzene present, it’s an increasingly rare position.Most now argue that utilities ought to test not only for benzene, but at least the rest of its immediate family, called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Others say they should also test for VOCs’ less-aggressive cousins, semi-volatile organic compounds, or SVOCs.With higher boiling points than VOCs, SVOCs are less likely to evaporate, but still pose an inhalation and ingestion risk. SVOCs are not necessarily less toxic to humans.Some VOCs and SVOCs — like the chemical responsible for the smell of pine in trees and car fresheners — are essentially harmless. Others, like benzene, are toxic to humans.“I don’t think [benzene] should be viewed as a perfect, comprehensive indicator, but it’s very much a good start,” said Chad Seidel, an environmental engineering research affiliate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and president of Corona Environmental Consulting, which assisted in the Marshall fire recovery. “I will say this: It is dramatically better than what the responses have been, say, not that long ago — maybe more than five years ago, where nobody was doing any of this.” Homes are left in ruins by the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., in 2018. (Noah Berger / Associated Press) In practice, many postfire water safety experts argue that to confidently say the water is safe for customers, utilities cannot rely on benzene alone.“There is no evidence that benzene is an indicator of contamination. … It simply isn’t,” Whelton said. “Unfortunately, that misinformation has traveled and continues to travel into decision-makers’ opinions.”In 2023, the California state Legislature codified postfire testing for benzene into law. While only benzene testing is required, the state’s Division of Drinking Water recommends that utilities test for the full range of VOCs — and the state, at times, has called benzene an “indicator” for other contaminants.For the Paradise Irrigation District, although testing for the full suite of VOCs can take slightly longer and cost a fair bit more, it was a pretty obvious choice (even amid pushback from the Division of Drinking Water and the EPA, at the time).“We decided to go above and beyond,” said Kevin Phillips, district manager with the Paradise Irrigation District, “because we wanted to give … our customers the utmost confidence that there were no other VOCs present in there.”Yet, many customers, living with cold showers and bottled water for months on end, remain frustrated with the lengthy process and uncertain if their water is safe. It’s why many water safety experts and utilities that have experienced postfire recovery have urged the L.A. utilities to remain as transparent as possible.“The last thing any water system wants is … to create some urban myth that the water in this certain water system is not safe,” said Kurt Kowar, director of public works for Louisville, Colo., which was devastated by the Marshall fire. “That can always stick with you, and if you can’t be transparent and generate trust through recovery, I think that would be a disservice to the community — if they don’t trust their water provided for the rest of their life.”The Paradise Irrigation District created an interactive online map of its entire system and the location of every test taken. And the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power created an online dashboard a month and a half after the fires listing the number of VOC detections in each of its zones in the Palisades fire burn area and the levels detected.Meanwhile, the smaller Altadena utilities, with limited personnel and resources, have been regularly posting joint updates to their websites outlining their recent testing, affected streets and the highest benzene levels found.But none of the L.A. utilities have posted the full testing data with exact locations. Part of the communication problem is a lack of guidance and assistance from the state, said Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group.That said, thanks to their much better understanding of the water contamination problem than in previous fires, the L.A. utilities have been optimistic about returning service far faster than they would have been a decade ago.How water systems recoverOnce Santa Rosa Water understood the problem it had on its hands, it started by aggressively flushing its system — opening up hydrants and valves to purge water through the entire network of pipes, hoping the released water would take the contaminants with it. While it worked for many areas within the burn area, the hardest-hit region proved difficult. By the time the city had gotten to flushing, benzene had bound itself to the pipes.Santa Rosa was forced to replace not only service lines to individual homes, but some of the main lines along the street as well. State water engineers are shown damaged equipment in Altadena on Feb. 12. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The L.A. utilities have been betting on flushing alone. It’s a strategy that seems to have worked — in part because they knew what steps to take earlier than utility companies in previous wildfires.In the Palisades, full service has already been restored. The Altadena utilities have made significant progress and remain hopeful they’ll be able to restore safe water much faster than the year it took Santa Rosa and the eight months it took Paradise.On the one-month anniversary of the fires, LADWP hesitantly and optimistically said it hoped to restore safe drinking water to the Palisades by the end of February. It succeeded in doing so on the two-month anniversary — only one week later than the estimate.“How you can get your customers back to their homes with the utilities they need? It is a heroic effort to pull those things off,” Seidel said. “I applaud those people that are willing to step up and pull off what it takes to do those things. It’s not easy.”

Water
Chemicals
Health

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