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How Poorer Countries Became the World’s Dumping Grounds

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Monday, March 10, 2025

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.

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.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

The greater Pittsburgh region is among the 25 worst metro areas in the country for air quality: Report

PITTSBURGH — The greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area is among the 25 regions in the country with the worst air pollution, according to a new report from the American Lung Association.The nonprofit public health organization’s annual “State of the Air” report uses a report card-style grading system to compare air quality in regions across the U.S. This year’s report found that 46% of Americans — 156.1 million people — are living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particulate pollution. Overall, air pollution measured by the report was worse than in previous years, with more Americans living in places with unhealthy air than in the previous 10 years the report has been published.The 13-county region spanning Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania; Weirton, West Virginia; and Steubenville, Ohio received “fail” grades for both daily and annual average particulate matter exposure for the years 2021–2023.The region ranked 16th worst for 24-hour particle pollution out of 225 metropolitan areas and 12th worst for annual particle pollution out of 208 metropolitan areas. Particulate matter pollution, which comes from things like industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, wildfires, and wood burning, causes higher rates of asthma, decreased lung function in children, and increased hospital admissions and premature death due to heart attacks and respiratory illness. Long-term exposure to particulate matter pollution also raises the risk of lung cancer, and research suggests that in the Pittsburgh region, air pollution linked to particulate matter and other harmful substances contributes significantly to cancer rates. According to the report, the Pittsburgh metro area is home to around 50,022 children with pediatric asthma, 227,806 adults with asthma, 173,588 people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), 250,600 people with cardiovascular disease, 1,468 people with lung cancer, and around 25,746 pregnant people, all of whom are especially vulnerable to the harmful impacts of particulate matter pollution exposure."The findings help community members understand the ongoing risks to the health of people in our region," said Matt Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project and the Breathe Collaborative, a coalition of more than 30 groups in southwestern Pennsylvania that advocate for cleaner air. "These findings emphasize the need to transition away from fossil fuels — in industry, transportation and residential uses — if we are to improve our health and address climate change." Allegheny County has received a failing grade for particulate matter pollution from the American Lung Association every year since the "State of the Air" report was first issued in 2004. The region is home to numerous polluting industries, with an estimated 80% of toxic air pollutants in Allegheny County (which encompasses Pittsburgh) coming from ten industrial sites, according to an analysis by the nonprofit environmental advocacy group PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center. The Ohio River near Pittsburgh Credit: Kristina Marusic for EHN In the 2024 State of the Air report, which looked at 2020-2022, Pittsburgh was for the first time ever not among the 25 cities most polluted by particulate matte, and showed some improvements in air quality, some of which may have resulted from pollution reductions spurred by the COVID-19 shut-down in 2020.The region earned a grade D for ozone smog this year, but its ranking improved from last year — it went from the 50th worst metro area for ozone smog in 2024’s report to the 90th worst in this year’s. Ozone pollution also comes from sources like vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions, and occurs when certain chemicals mix with sunlight. Exposure to ozone pollution is linked to respiratory issues, worsened asthma symptoms, and long-term lung damage.Each year the State of the Air Report makes recommendations for improving air quality. This year those recommendations include defending funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), because sweeping staff cuts and reduction of federal funding under the Trump administration are impairing the agency’s ability to enforce clean air regulations. For example, the report notes that EPA recently lowered annual limits for fine particulate matter pollution from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9 micrograms per cubic meter, and that states, including Pennsylvania, have submitted their recommendations for which areas should be cleaned up. Next, the agency must review those recommendations and add its own analyses to make final decisions by February 6, 2026 about which areas need additional pollution controls. If it fails to do so due to lack of funding or staffing, the report suggests, air quality might suffer.“The bottom line is this,” the report states. “EPA staff, working in communities across the country, are doing crucial work to keep your air clean. Staff cuts are already impacting people’s health across the country. Further cuts mean more dirty air.”

PITTSBURGH — The greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area is among the 25 regions in the country with the worst air pollution, according to a new report from the American Lung Association.The nonprofit public health organization’s annual “State of the Air” report uses a report card-style grading system to compare air quality in regions across the U.S. This year’s report found that 46% of Americans — 156.1 million people — are living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particulate pollution. Overall, air pollution measured by the report was worse than in previous years, with more Americans living in places with unhealthy air than in the previous 10 years the report has been published.The 13-county region spanning Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania; Weirton, West Virginia; and Steubenville, Ohio received “fail” grades for both daily and annual average particulate matter exposure for the years 2021–2023.The region ranked 16th worst for 24-hour particle pollution out of 225 metropolitan areas and 12th worst for annual particle pollution out of 208 metropolitan areas. Particulate matter pollution, which comes from things like industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, wildfires, and wood burning, causes higher rates of asthma, decreased lung function in children, and increased hospital admissions and premature death due to heart attacks and respiratory illness. Long-term exposure to particulate matter pollution also raises the risk of lung cancer, and research suggests that in the Pittsburgh region, air pollution linked to particulate matter and other harmful substances contributes significantly to cancer rates. According to the report, the Pittsburgh metro area is home to around 50,022 children with pediatric asthma, 227,806 adults with asthma, 173,588 people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), 250,600 people with cardiovascular disease, 1,468 people with lung cancer, and around 25,746 pregnant people, all of whom are especially vulnerable to the harmful impacts of particulate matter pollution exposure."The findings help community members understand the ongoing risks to the health of people in our region," said Matt Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project and the Breathe Collaborative, a coalition of more than 30 groups in southwestern Pennsylvania that advocate for cleaner air. "These findings emphasize the need to transition away from fossil fuels — in industry, transportation and residential uses — if we are to improve our health and address climate change." Allegheny County has received a failing grade for particulate matter pollution from the American Lung Association every year since the "State of the Air" report was first issued in 2004. The region is home to numerous polluting industries, with an estimated 80% of toxic air pollutants in Allegheny County (which encompasses Pittsburgh) coming from ten industrial sites, according to an analysis by the nonprofit environmental advocacy group PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center. The Ohio River near Pittsburgh Credit: Kristina Marusic for EHN In the 2024 State of the Air report, which looked at 2020-2022, Pittsburgh was for the first time ever not among the 25 cities most polluted by particulate matte, and showed some improvements in air quality, some of which may have resulted from pollution reductions spurred by the COVID-19 shut-down in 2020.The region earned a grade D for ozone smog this year, but its ranking improved from last year — it went from the 50th worst metro area for ozone smog in 2024’s report to the 90th worst in this year’s. Ozone pollution also comes from sources like vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions, and occurs when certain chemicals mix with sunlight. Exposure to ozone pollution is linked to respiratory issues, worsened asthma symptoms, and long-term lung damage.Each year the State of the Air Report makes recommendations for improving air quality. This year those recommendations include defending funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), because sweeping staff cuts and reduction of federal funding under the Trump administration are impairing the agency’s ability to enforce clean air regulations. For example, the report notes that EPA recently lowered annual limits for fine particulate matter pollution from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9 micrograms per cubic meter, and that states, including Pennsylvania, have submitted their recommendations for which areas should be cleaned up. Next, the agency must review those recommendations and add its own analyses to make final decisions by February 6, 2026 about which areas need additional pollution controls. If it fails to do so due to lack of funding or staffing, the report suggests, air quality might suffer.“The bottom line is this,” the report states. “EPA staff, working in communities across the country, are doing crucial work to keep your air clean. Staff cuts are already impacting people’s health across the country. Further cuts mean more dirty air.”

New, 'Living' Building Material Made From Fungi and Bacteria Could Pave the Way to Self-Healing Structures

Researchers are developing the biomaterial as a more environmentally friendly alternative to concrete, but any wide-scale use is still far away

New, ‘Living’ Building Material Made From Fungi and Bacteria Could Pave the Way to Self-Healing Structures Researchers are developing the biomaterial as a more environmentally friendly alternative to concrete, but any wide-scale use is still far away Microscopic images of the bacteria and mycelium scaffolds. The circles indicate the likely presence of S. pasteurii bacteria. Viles, Ethan et al., Cell Reports Physical Science 2025 Concrete is a crucial construction material. Unfortunately, however, producing it requires large amounts of energy—often powered by fossil fuels—and includes chemical reactions that release carbon dioxide. This intensive process is responsible for up to 8 percent of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions. As such, finding more sustainable building materials is vital to lessening our global carbon footprint. And to help achieve this goal, scientists are studying methods that might replace concrete with biologically derived materials, or biomaterials for short. Now, researchers have developed a building material made of mycelium—the tubular, branching filaments found in most fungi—and bacteria cells. As detailed in a study published last week in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the living bacteria survived in the structure for an extended amount of time, laying the groundwork for more environmentally friendly and self-healing construction material down the line. The researchers grew mycelium from the fungus Neurospora crassa, commonly known as red bread mold, into a dense, scaffold-like structure. Then, they added Sporosarcina pasteurii bacteria. “We like these organisms for several reasons,” Chelsea Heveran, a co-author of the study and an expert in engineered living materials at Montana State University, tells the Debrief’s Ryan Whalen. “First, they do not pose very much threat to human health. S. pasteurii is a common soil microorganism and has been used for years in biomineralization research, including in field-scale commercial applications. N. crassa is a model organism in fungal research.” They also liked that both organisms are capable of biomineralization—the process that forms bones and coral by creating hardened calcium carbonate. To set off biomineralization, the team placed the scaffold in a growing medium with urea and calcium. The bacteria formed calcium carbonate quickly and effectively, making the material stronger. Importantly, the bacteria S. pasteurii was alive, or viable, for at least a month. Live organisms in building material could offer unique properties—such as the ability to self-repair or self-clean—but only as long as they’re alive. This study didn’t test those traits specifically, according to a statement, but the longer lifetime of this material “lays the groundwork for these functionalities.” “We are excited about our results,” Heveran tells New Scientist’s James Woodford. “When viability is sufficiently high, we could start really imparting lasting biological characteristics to the material that we care about, such as self-healing, sensing or environmental remediation.” This month-long lifespan marks a significant improvement over previous structures. In fact, a major challenge in the development of living biomaterials is their short viability—other similar materials made with living organisms have remained viable for just days or weeks. Plus, they don’t usually form the complex internal structures necessary in construction projects, according to the statement. In the new study, however, “we learned that fungal scaffolds are quite useful for controlling the internal architecture of the material,” Heveran explains in the statement. “We created internal geometries that looked like cortical bone, but moving forward, we could potentially construct other geometries, too.” Ultimately, the researchers developed a tough structure that could provide the basis for future sustainable building alternatives. As reported by New Atlas’ Abhimanyu Ghoshal, however, scientists still have other challenges to tackle on the path to replacing concrete—for instance, scaling the material’s production, making it usable for different types of construction projects and overcoming the higher costs associated with living biomaterials. These materials, so far, “do not have high enough strength to replace concrete in all applications,” Heveran says in the statement. “But we and others are working to improve their properties so they can see greater usage.” To that end, Aysu Kuru, a building engineer at the University of Sydney in Australia who did not participate in the study, tells New Scientist that “proposing mycelium as a scaffolding medium for living materials is a simple but powerful strategy.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

New electronic “skin” could enable lightweight night-vision glasses

MIT engineers developed ultrathin electronic films that sense heat and other signals, and could reduce the bulk of conventional goggles and scopes.

MIT engineers have developed a technique to grow and peel ultrathin “skins” of electronic material. The method could pave the way for new classes of electronic devices, such as ultrathin wearable sensors, flexible transistors and computing elements, and highly sensitive and compact imaging devices. As a demonstration, the team fabricated a thin membrane of pyroelectric material — a class of heat-sensing material that produces an electric current in response to changes in temperature. The thinner the pyroelectric material, the better it is at sensing subtle thermal variations.With their new method, the team fabricated the thinnest pyroelectric membrane yet, measuring 10 nanometers thick, and demonstrated that the film is highly sensitive to heat and radiation across the far-infrared spectrum.The newly developed film could enable lighter, more portable, and highly accurate far-infrared (IR) sensing devices, with potential applications for night-vision eyewear and autonomous driving in foggy conditions. Current state-of-the-art far-IR sensors require bulky cooling elements. In contrast, the new pyroelectric thin film requires no cooling and is sensitive to much smaller changes in temperature. The researchers are exploring ways to incorporate the film into lighter, higher-precision night-vision glasses.“This film considerably reduces weight and cost, making it lightweight, portable, and easier to integrate,” Xinyuan Zhang, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “For example, it could be directly worn on glasses.”The heat-sensing film could also have applications in environmental and biological sensing, as well as imaging of astrophysical phenomena that emit far-infrared radiation.What’s more, the new lift-off technique is generalizable beyond pyroelectric materials. The researchers plan to apply the method to make other ultrathin, high-performance semiconducting films.Their results are reported today in a paper appearing in the journal Nature. The study’s MIT co-authors are first author Xinyuan Zhang, Sangho Lee, Min-Kyu Song, Haihui Lan, Jun Min Suh, Jung-El Ryu, Yanjie Shao, Xudong Zheng, Ne Myo Han, and Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of materials science and engineering, along with researchers at the University Wisconsin at Madison led by Professor Chang-Beom Eom and authors from multiple other institutions.Chemical peelKim’s group at MIT is finding new ways to make smaller, thinner, and more flexible electronics. They envision that such ultrathin computing “skins” can be incorporated into everything from smart contact lenses and wearable sensing fabrics to stretchy solar cells and bendable displays. To realize such devices, Kim and his colleagues have been experimenting with methods to grow, peel, and stack semiconducting elements, to fabricate ultrathin, multifunctional electronic thin-film membranes.One method that Kim has pioneered is “remote epitaxy” — a technique where semiconducting materials are grown on a single-crystalline substrate, with an ultrathin layer of graphene in between. The substrate’s crystal structure serves as a scaffold along which the new material can grow. The graphene acts as a nonstick layer, similar to Teflon, making it easy for researchers to peel off the new film and transfer it onto flexible and stacked electronic devices. After peeling off the new film, the underlying substrate can be reused to make additional thin films.Kim has applied remote epitaxy to fabricate thin films with various characteristics. In trying different combinations of semiconducting elements, the researchers happened to notice that a certain pyroelectric material, called PMN-PT, did not require an intermediate layer assist in order to separate from its substrate. Just by growing PMN-PT directly on a single-crystalline substrate, the researchers could then remove the grown film, with no rips or tears to its delicate lattice.“It worked surprisingly well,” Zhang says. “We found the peeled film is atomically smooth.”Lattice lift-offIn their new study, the MIT and UW Madison researchers took a closer look at the process and discovered that the key to the material’s easy-peel property was lead. As part of its chemical structure, the team, along with colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, discovered that the pyroelectric film contains an orderly arrangement of lead atoms that have a large “electron affinity,” meaning that lead attracts electrons and prevents the charge carriers from traveling and connecting to another materials such as an underlying substrate. The lead acts as tiny nonstick units, allowing the material as a whole to peel away, perfectly intact.The team ran with the realization and fabricated multiple ultrathin films of PMN-PT, each about 10 nanometers thin. They peeled off pyroelectric films and transfered them onto a small chip to form an array of 100 ultrathin heat-sensing pixels, each about 60 square microns (about .006 square centimeters). They exposed the films to ever-slighter changes in temperature and found the pixels were highly sensitive to small changes across the far-infrared spectrum.The sensitivity of the pyroelectric array is comparable to that of state-of-the-art night-vision devices. These devices are currently based on photodetector materials, in which a change in temperature induces the material’s electrons to jump in energy and briefly cross an energy “band gap,” before settling back into their ground state. This electron jump serves as an electrical signal of the temperature change. However, this signal can be affected by noise in the environment, and to prevent such effects, photodetectors have to also include cooling devices that bring the instruments down to liquid nitrogen temperatures.Current night-vision goggles and scopes are heavy and bulky. With the group’s new pyroelectric-based approach, NVDs could have the same sensitivity without the cooling weight.The researchers also found that the films were sensitive beyond the range of current night-vision devices and could respond to wavelengths across the entire infrared spectrum. This suggests that the films could be incorporated into small, lightweight, and portable devices for various applications that require different infrared regions. For instance, when integrated into autonomous vehicle platforms, the films could enable cars to “see” pedestrians and vehicles in complete darkness or in foggy and rainy conditions. The film could also be used in gas sensors for real-time and on-site environmental monitoring, helping detect pollutants. In electronics, they could monitor heat changes in semiconductor chips to catch early signs of malfunctioning elements.The team says the new lift-off method can be generalized to materials that may not themselves contain lead. In those cases, the researchers suspect that they can infuse Teflon-like lead atoms into the underlying substrate to induce a similar peel-off effect. For now, the team is actively working toward incorporating the pyroelectric films into a functional night-vision system.“We envision that our ultrathin films could be made into high-performance night-vision goggles, considering its broad-spectrum infrared sensitivity at room-temperature, which allows for a lightweight design without a cooling system,” Zhang says. “To turn this into a night-vision system, a functional device array should be integrated with readout circuitry. Furthermore, testing in varied environmental conditions is essential for practical applications.”This work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

President of Eugene wood treatment plant gets 90-day prison term for lying to DEQ inspectors

"There has to be some accountability," U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane said.

A federal judge Tuesday sentenced the president of Eugene’s J.H. Baxter & Co. wood treatment plant to 90 days in prison for lying about the company’s illegal handling of hazardous waste at the site.U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane called Georgia Baxter-Krause, 62, an “absent president” who took little responsibility for what occurred.“The fact that you lied when confronted suggests you knew the practice was not ‘above board,’” McShane said. “There has to be some accountability.”He also ordered Baxter-Krause and the company to pay $1.5 million in criminal fines. The plant is now a potential cleanup site under the federal Superfund program.J.H. Baxter & Co. Inc. pleaded guilty to illegally treating hazardous waste and Baxter-Krause pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements in violation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act governing hazardous waste management.The company so far has paid $850,000 of its $1 million share of the fine, and Baxter-Krause has paid $250,000 of her $500,000 share, their attorney David Angeli said.Much of the debate at the sentencing focused on whether Baxter-Krause should go to prison for lying to investigators.According to court documents, J.H. Baxter used hazardous chemicals to treat and preserve wood. Water from the process was considered hazardous waste. The company operated a legal wastewater treatment unit, but for years when there was “too much water on site,” the company essentially would “boil” off the wastewater, allowing discharge into the air through open vents, according to court records.Photograph sent to Georgia Baxter-Krause on July 8, 2019, depicting the inside of a J.H. Baxter container after weeks of boiling hazardous waste, according to federal prosecutors.U.S. Attorney's OfficeAngeli argued that the violations at the Eugene plant were “less egregious” than other criminal environmental damage cases and that “everyone” on the premises thought the hazardous waste handling was OK. He sought probation for Baxter-Krause.“Every person said she never directed or managed this activity,” Angeli said. “She was rarely even in Eugene.”But Assistant U.S. Attorney William McLaren said Baxter-Krause blatantly lied when inspectors from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality requested information about the company’s practice of boiling off the wastewater.Baxter-Krause provided false information when questioned about the extent of the illegal activity and failed to disclose that the company kept detailed logs that tracked it, according to prosecutors.The plant illegally boiled about 600,000 gallons of wastewater on 136 days from January to October 2019, McLaren said.The government didn’t seek the maximum fine for the environmental violations, which would have been $7 million for each day a violation was found, he said. A separate civil class-action suit is pending against the company filed by people living near the West Eugene plant. They allege gross negligence that allowed “carcinogenic and poisonous chemicals’’ to be regularly released into the air and groundwater. Baxter-Krause told an investigator that the company didn’t keep records on the boiling dates and claimed it occurred only occasionally during the rainy season, records said.“Those were not minimal or immaterial slip-ups,” McLaren said. What the company was doing was “known for years on end” and it was occurring every month, he said.“Despite alerts about equipment failure and the need for capital upgrades, the evidence reflects those warnings went unheeded by J.H. Baxter’s leadership for years,” McLaren said. “And by early 2019, this illegal boiling became the company’s sole method for treating their hazardous wastewater.”Baxter-Krause, who took over the company in 2001 after her father’s death, apologized to the community around the plant and to her friends and family. She now lives in Bend but had lived in California throughout her tenure as company president and visited the Eugene facility about three times a year, according to her lawyers.“I should have been honest,” she said. “To the West Eugene community who was impacted by my careless actions, I apologize. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel remorse. I am ashamed of what I have done. I feel I have truly let you down.”She acknowledged that as president, “the buck stops with me. I should have been more proactive in fully understanding the facility’s permits, the day-to-day operations and ensuring full compliance with environmental laws.”J.H. Baxter treated wood products at the plant from 1943 to 2022. Chemicals used to treat wood, such as creosote and pentachlorophenol, also known as “penta” or PCP, have contaminated the soil and groundwater and are an ongoing concern for surrounding neighborhoods, according to the government.The chemicals remain in tanks at the site and the environmental contamination has not been addressed, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.The company has spent more than $2 million since the plant’s closure to secure the facility and work on complying with environmental regulations, but it has been unable to sell the property because of the historical contamination, according to court records.The judge said it will be up to the Federal Bureau of Prisons where to send Baxter-Krause to serve the sentence. The defense said it would request that she be placed in a community corrections setting.Baxter-Krause was ordered to surrender on July 17. She wondered aloud in the courtroom after her sentencing how she would maintain the compliance reports.Her lawyers explained that the Environmental Protection Agency is on site daily working to fully shut the property down.The EPA is still working to determine how to handle and remove chemicals from the site. It collected soil, sediment, and water samples in May 2023 from both the facility and the surrounding areas. These samples will determine the environmental and potential public health impacts of chemicals that have migrated from the site and from air pollution from its operations.-- Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X @maxoregonian, on Bluesky @maxbernstein.bsky.social or on LinkedIn.

Your Clothes Are Shedding Bits of Plastic. Here’s What People Are Doing About It This Earth Day

Plastic is everywhere — and yet some people may be surprised at how much they actually wear

Bottles and bags, food wrappers and straws. Piping, packaging, toys and trays. Plastic is everywhere — and yet some people may be surprised at how much they actually wear.A typical closet is loaded with plastic, woven into polyester activewear, acrylic sweaters, nylon swimsuits and stretchy socks — and it’s shedding into the environment nonstop.Even natural fabrics shed fibers and have chemicals that can leach into the environment. But polyester is the most widely used fiber on Earth, and along with other synthetic fibers accounts for about two-thirds of production worldwide. Tuesday is Earth Day, when people worldwide contemplate ways to reduce their impact on the planet.“Everyone who wears and launders clothing is part of this problem but everyone who wears and launders clothing can be part of the solutions,” said Rachael Z. Miller, founder of Vermont-based Rozalia Project for a Clean Ocean.Simple changes like washing clothes less and using cold water instead of hot can help reduce the shedding of fibers. More challenging is that textiles need to be produced and used in a more sustainable way, said Elisa Tonda at the UN Environment Programme. For example, designing clothes that shed fewer microfibers and are high-quality to last longer, said Tonda, who leads the resources and markets branch. What to do? Start by changing habits The easiest solution is to wash clothes less often, making for less of the friction that breaks fibers apart, said Anja Brandon, director of plastics policy at Ocean Conservancy.“They get tumbled and tossed around with a bunch of soaps, really designed to shake things up to get out dirt and stains,” Brandon said. Miller uses a stain stick to spot-clean. Both say that when clothes are washed, they shed less when put in cold water in full loads to reduce friction, on a shorter cycle, then hung to dry.Inspired by the way coral filters the ocean, Miller invented the Cora Ball, a laundry ball that can be tossed into the washer to cut down on clothes banging into each other. It also catches microfibers. (A portion of the proceeds goes to the Rozalia Project.) Another option is to put synthetic fabrics in a washing bag that captures fibers.Miller said people don't need to rush to throw out clothing that's more likely to shed. She owns fleece jackets herself. Instead, she suggested such clothing can be worn indoors only or outside with a layer on top, and it's worth thinking twice about acquiring more garments like that.“I try not to guilt or panic people because a lot of this information is very new,” Miller said. “And so we might as well just say, ‘OK, I got it. How can I be strategic about what I’ve got?’” A push to require filters Filters can be added to washers to capture microfibers. Samsung Electronics collaborated with Patagonia and the global conservation organization Ocean Wise to launch one in 2023. It's now sold in more than 20 countries for front-load washers. Bosch recently launched a microfiber filter in Europe for washers.France was first to adopt a law to mandate that new washing machines sold in the country have a microfiber filter, though implementation has been delayed.In the U.S., efforts to mandate filters in states have failed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill in 2023, saying he was concerned about the cost to consumers and he wants to incentivize, not mandate, technologies to remove microfibers in wastewater. In Oregon, state Sen. Deb Patterson proposed a bill this year requiring microfiber filters on new washers sold in that state after she came across the technology in Canada. Patterson said the bill doesn't have enough support yet but she'll keep trying. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers opposes the proposals, saying it's concerned about consumer costs and filter effectiveness.Some big brands are testing their fabrics to help researchers understand fiber fragmentation, including Adidas, Nike, Patagonia and Under Armour.They're among more than 90 brands, retailers and manufacturers to partner with The Microfibre Consortium in the United Kingdom, founded in 2018 to do research and offer solutions to transform textile production — including reducing fiber breakup.Nearly 1,500 fabrics have been tested. None are the same, making it a tough problem to solve, consortium CEO Kelly Sheridan said. Patagonia has been a leader in trying to stop the spread of synthetic fiber waste into air and water, saying it's up to garment brands to prevent it at the source since cleaning up microplastics in the environment is not yet possible. It paid for its own research starting a decade ago on the implication of its clothes. The company worked with suppliers to choose fabrics and dyes and to finish their clothing in ways that reduce shedding. They collaborated on new filtration technologies for washers, textile mills and municipal systems.One of their best-known styles is something called the “better sweater" that shifts from virgin polyester to recycled polyester to cut shedding by about 40%, said Matt Dwyer, vice president of global product footprint. And at textile mills, there's a prewash at the factory that can capture that first big shed, he added.Dwyer is optimistic about progress.“There’s a whole lot of smart people, not just understanding the problem and the scope of the problem, but also looking for solutions all the way through the manufacturing cycle and use phase,” he said. “Compared to 10 years ago, it’s a whole new world.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.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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