Plastic | YPGG - Why Green?

Scientists Conducting Research into Fluorinated Pollutants Known As PFAs

April 23, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - Scientists have been placing a growing emphasis on a series of commonly-found – but until recently misunderstood – chemicals typically utilized in the creation of consumer products such as water-resistant clothing, stain-resistant furniture, nonstick cookware, and more, focusing mainly on their intrusion into the environment and the subsequent potential health risks to human beings.

Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl are perfluorinated chemicals – or PFAs for short – were created in the mid-20th century and have found widespread use in creating non-stick items serving a variety of uses, including in plastic and rubber used to make food wrappers, umbrellas, tents, carpets and firefighting foam. PFAs are resistant to water, oil, and heat, and their omnipresence in today’s society has resulted in these chemicals making their way into the environment...including our drinking water.

Testing has revealed PFAs in rivers, lakes, and drinking water supplies, according to reports; subsequently, PFAs are now being actually being found in people, particularly in their bloodstreams. And the reason that this is occurring is due to the resiliency of these chemicals, as they often take an extremely long amount of time to break down in the environment...or the human body. As a result, a person could have PFAs in their blood for years, or even decades, experts say, and if these pollutants are saturated in a person’s local environment, they could have a continual source of contamination ensuring non-stop exposure.

However, is exposure to PFAs harmful, and if so, what are the risks? These are questions that scientists are currently not able to provide answers to, as their research into PFAs is essentially in its earliest stages. In fact, a current legal safety limit of exposure to PFAs hasn’t even been established yet by any group that governs public environmental or health issues. Science needs to provide answers before PFAs can be properly regulated, experts say. Regardless, the Environmental Protection Agency has made note of the fact that it intends to eventually establish legal safety limit for certain PFAs in drinking water, although what types – there are currently over 5,000 and growing – and the amounts have not been revealed as of yet.

The amount of money going into public research of PFAs has been steadily increasing by groups such as the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multiple state university systems. One issue that makes research into PFAs difficult, however, is the fact that current regulations that govern chemicals in the United States do not require that a chemical has to be proven to be hazardous before it can be sold; instead, the EPA must make a determination following testing that a given chemical poses a risk under specific circumstances in order for action to be taken, and normally this only happens after health concerns are expressed by the public.

Early testing of PFAs has established some of the potential risks the chemical can pose to the health and well-being of both environments and people; research has determined that a "probable link" exists between long-term exposure to a PFAs chemical called PFOA and kidney cancer and thyroid disease developed by people in West Virginia and Ohio who were allegedly exposed to the substance by chemical company DuPont; a class-action lawsuit is currently in the works.

A 2016 study found unsafe levels of PFAs in 194 out of 4,864 water supplies in 33 U.S. states. Covering two-thirds of drinking water supplies in the United States, the study found thirteen states accounted for 75% of the detections, and firefighting foam was singled out as a major contributor. In addition, a 2018 report to Congress indicated that "at least 126 drinking water systems on or near military bases" were contaminated with PFAS compounds.

Scientific studies of both humans and rodents have resulted in similar findings, lending credence to the worries that PFAs pose serious health risks. However, scientists working on research and testing into PFAs still say that they are approximately two years away from concrete answers. However, it certainly can’t be expected that the answers – when they eventually come – will be anything positive. But in the meantime, supporting programs that look at risks to the environment can help, as can reaching out to your local legislators and lawmakers to tighten chemical production oversight and regulation.

After all, if perfluorinated chemicals were supposed to be in the environment – and our bodies – wouldn’t Mother Nature have put them there already?

The Threat of Plastic on the Environment Evolves into “Microplastics”

April 18, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - As if the danger that discarded, non-biodegradable plastics pose to the environment aren’t enough, a new breed is making its presence felt; a dangerous evolution known as “Microplastics.”

Microplastics are not a specific kind of plastic, but rather any type of plastic fragment that is less than five millimeters in length; they enter natural ecosystems from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, cosmetics, clothing, and industrial processes.

Some Microplastics enter the environment directly as a result of various sources, such as microfibers from clothing, microbeads, and plastic pellets; however, they are also the result of the degradation of larger plastic products once they enter the environment through natural weathering processes. Such sources of secondary microplastics include water and soda bottles, fishing nets, and plastic bags, and much more.

Both types of microplastics are recognized to persist in the environment at high levels, particularly in aquatic and marine ecosystems. And as plastic typically degrades very, very slowly, often over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years, the chances of microplastics being inadvertently ingested or incorporated into the bodies and tissues of a variety of different animals and organisms – including human beings – are on the rise with each and every passing year.

According to a 2014 report, there are approximately 51 trillion pieces of microplastic in the Earth’s oceans, with an estimated weight of 236,000 metric tons. By 2019, that amount has almost certainly increased exponentially. In addition, microplastics on land are often small and light enough that they are able to easily able to migrate around the globe, carried by the wind; microplastics have even been discovered on remote mountaintops, according to a new study. Microplastics are being found in rivers, oceans, soils, and even tap water around the world.

As a result of the spread of microplastics throughout a variety of environments, experts theorize that numerous humans and animals are likely to have consumed the particles at points via food and water; however, currently it is not known if this has any potentially adverse effects upon the health upon living creatures or the ecosystems they inhabit, but scientists are currently conducting research into the issue. But if it turns out that the prevalence of microplastics is indeed a serious health problem, experts say it will be a major one, given how this is turning into a problem through sheer volume alone that will likely touch each and every living thing on the planet.

But the problem is that this is also an issue that is still in its infantsy; given the relatively recent introduction of plastic into our society compared to the age of humanity itself, scientists are still attempting to gauge the scope of microplastics, its possible health effects, and – most importantly – to come up with possible solutions.

Bioplastics – plant-based plastics, as opposed to fossil fuel-based – are a development that many are touting as an effective solution to plastic pollution, as their biodegradable nature is possible solution to the large amounts of microplastic waste in the Earth’s ecosystems. But recent studies have indicated that bioplastics come with their own built-in environmental and health issues that may prevent them from being the answer we’re seeking, and may ultimately be just as harmful to the planet as conventional plastics.

Some researchers have proposed incinerating plastics to use as energy, which is known as energy recovery. As opposed to losing the energy from plastics into the atmosphere in landfills, this process turns some of the plastics back into energy that can be used.

However, as opposed to recycling, this method does not diminish the amount of plastic material that is produced. Therefore, recycling plastics is considered a more efficient solution, especially by increasing education via recycling campaigns. While this would be a smaller scale solution, education has been shown to reduce littering, especially in urban environments where there are often large concentrations of plastic waste. If recycling efforts are increased, a cycle of plastic use and reuse would be created to decrease our waste output and production of new raw materials.
But in order to achieve this, states would need to employ stronger infrastructure and investment around recycling. Some advocate for improving recycling technology to be able to recycle smaller plastics to reduce the need for production of new plastics.

Bioplastics – Not Good for the Environment After All?

April 15, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - According to recent reports, bioplastics would conceivably be as bad – if not worse – for the environment than conventional plastics, news that is taking a lot of green advocates completely by surprise.

Bioplastics are plastics derived from renewable biomass sources, such as vegetable fats and oils, corn starch, straw, woodchips, food waste, etc. Bioplastic can be made from agricultural by-products and also from used plastic bottles and other containers using microorganisms. Common plastics, such as fossil-fuel plastics (also called petrobased polymers) are derived from petroleum or natural gas.

Although bioplastics are extremely advantageous because they reduce non-renewable consumption and GHG emissions, they actually pose several risks to the environment, reports say; some through their creation, and some through their disposal. One issue is the fact that, in order to grow the raw materials needed for the creation of bioplastic, vast amounts of farmland and water would be required – in addition to pesticide and fertilizer – which could lead to environmental issues. Bioplastics also increase eutrophication – runoff of excessive richness of nutrients that causes a dense growth of plant life and death of animal life from lack of oxygen – acidification, which is the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide.

In addition, some bioplastics are made from the edible parts of crops; its creation can compete with food production because the crops that produce bioplastics can also be used to feed people, resulting in reduction of readily-available food sources for human beings.

Another issue is that not all bioplastics are biodegradable nor biodegrade more readily than commodity fossil-fuel derived plastics; instead, most current bioplastics are, instead, merely compostable and not biodegradable. Instead of harmlessly degrading if discarded, bioplastics will only break down into harmless biomass and gas within a few months if they are in the right environment for this to take place. If thrown away under more normal circumstances, bioplastics will actually break down as slowly as conventional plastics. But even when it does break down, acidity associated with its doing so will serve to pollute its surroundings to a degree, rendering its biodegradable status rather moot.

Soil and compost as environment conditions are more efficient in biodegradation due to their high microbial diversity. Composting not only biodegrades bioplastics efficiently but it also significantly reduces the emission of greenhouse gases.

However, bioplastics in soil environments need higher temperatures and a longer time to biodegrade. Some bioplastics biodegrade more efficiently in water bodies and marine systems; however, this causes danger to marine ecosystems and freshwater. Hence, it is accurate to conclude that biodegradation of bioplastics in water bodies which leads to the death of aquatic organisms and unhealthy water can be noted as one of the negative environmental impacts of bioplastics.

Conventional plastics, while still harmful to the environment and especially animals, nonetheless are largely an “aesthetic” problem; that is, they are non-reactive and because they do not break down in the way that bioplastics do, they cause no physical harm to ecosystems… only the inhabitants within it, unfortunately, which is still a major issue that must be addressed.

Instead, experts say, the better option is to simply recycle your conventional plastic regularly and without fail, while encouraging the industry to continue to innovate and refine its methods to increase efficiency and lessen environmental impact. One of the best ways to do that, experts say, is to eventually abolish single-use plastics altogether, which is one of the biggest contributors to the ongoing plastic crisis facing the planet today.

The Single-Use Plastic Waste Crisis Facing the Planet – Is There a Solution?

March 26, 2019 / Chris Boyle / 0 Comments

NEW YORK - One of the biggest problems currently facing the delicate ecosystem of our planet is the production and the use of single-use plastic.

The member nations of the UN environmental assembly has been pushing in recent years to phase out single-use plastic worldwide, and a recent agreement reached is going some way to eventually achieving that goal. By 2030, many UN member nations have agreed to “significantly reduce” the amount of single-use plastics they produce/dispose of via a variety of methods, including advances pertaining to waste management, the adoption of more environmentally-sound plastic alternatives, and an overall reduction of the use of plastic on a global scale.

However, the agreement – however well-intentioned – is not legally-binding in any way; the member nations who are partaking in it are under no ironclad obligation to do so, but instead are on an “honor system” of sorts. Due to this fact, the long-term effectiveness of the UN environmental assembly agreement is up in the air.

MARPOL, an international treaty signed in 1988 that bans ships from dumping plastic waste into ocean, is currently the only global-scale agreement that carries any true force, although recent studies now indicate that 80 percent of the 8 tons of plastic waste that ends up in the sea annually currently originates from land, not ships. Obviously – as is the case with technology and the internet – this is a case of the law desperately needing to up catch up with the times.

In light of these issues, there have been calls for a legally-binding international treaty that effectively deals with the modern aspects of pollution on a global scale, especially when it comes to the critical damage dealt to the environment as our planet finds itself relying every more and more on single-use plastics. In fact, marine scientists in 2017 noted that micro-plastics are capable of altering genes, cells, and tissues in marine organisms, resulting in death and decreased reproduction. Clearly, something needs to be done.

A ray of hope, however, comes in the prominence of marine plastic in this year’s UN environmental assembly conference after numerous delegates have voiced demands for real, substantial, and legally-binding action on the part of international lawmakers. Serious talks are expected to be held on solutions to the issue, both in terms of the reduction of plastic consumption and clean-up efforts to address the damage that has already been done worldwide.

Quite simply, its production of plastics that needs to be curtailed; essentially, we need less plastics. A U.S. State Department spokesman said in a statement that the U.S. considers marine plastic “a growing issue needing urgent action, and that improved waste management is the fastest way to achieve that goal. We support reducing the environmental impacts from the discharges of plastics…improved waste management could radically decrease these discharges.”

Clearly, improvements in worldwide waste management would be a huge factor in curbing the plastic waste issue; however, the UN estimates that only 40 percent of the global population currently lacks access to waste disposal systems. Couple that with the fact that the plastic industry has been churning out product at rates faster than ever in human history, with half the plastic on Earth having been made since 2005; astonishingly, that amount is expected to double in the next 20 years. $0 percent of that plastic is considered disposable, and is blamed by many for the current predicament that world’s oceans are facing.

To date, 127 countries have begun to regulate plastic bags, and 27 have banned certain types of single-use plastic, such as the types used in the creation of plates, straws, and cups. India has announced plans to outlaw all single-use plastics in their country by 2022, and England has legislation in the pipeline that will ban many types of single-use plastics by 2021 and significantly reduce others by 2028.

In fact, many members of the European Union are undertaking similar measures, making the collection of nations the planet’s leading crusaders in the plastic crisis. Hopefully, other nations will eventually follow their example, and together they can adopt sensible and realistic plastic reform laws that will eventually serve to undo all of the harm that has been inflicted upon the Earth by the rampant use of single-use plastics. Yes, the solution may end up causing some minor inconveniences for people who have come to rely upon plastic in their daily lives for a variety of uses, but the benefits – both to people and the planet that we all inhabit – are more than worth it.

Tag: Plastic

Scientists Conducting Research into Fluorinated Pollutants Known As PFAs

The Threat of Plastic on the Environment Evolves into “Microplastics”

Bioplastics – Not Good for the Environment After All?

The Single-Use Plastic Waste Crisis Facing the Planet – Is There a Solution?

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