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Plastic pollution has gotten far out of hand. To add to the obvious large plastic pollutants found almost anywhere on earth, over time, other plastics have been torn apart and shredded into miniscule particulates—and these little particulates have gotten everywhere, from the deepest parts of the ocean, to the tallest cliffs of Everest (Gramling, Apr. 15, 2019). And really it’s no wonder: plastic has been playing an increasingly integral role in human life since PVC was first polymerized in the 1830s (PlasticsEurope.com, 2020), production ramped up drastically in the early 1900s with the synthesis of Bakelite, and production was again significantly ramped up shortly after WW2. Current estimates suggest that around “8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been created by humans since the early 1950s” (Cole, July 24, 2017)—and save for a couple of minor dips thanks to the odd economic recession, the rates of production don’t seem to be going down at all (Ritchie & Roser, 2018).
Recycling rates have looked equally dismal, especially since prior to the 1980s, plastic generally was not recycled at all, and the volume of plastic incinerated significantly outweighs the volume that has been recycled, even with increased plastic management efforts. In 2015, only about 20% of plastic waste was recycled, about 25% was incinerated, and about 55% was just discarded (Ritchie & Roser, 2018).
Plastic particles get continuously dispersed across the globe in a myriad of ways. While the vast majority of it is still just discarded and left to the winds of time to be shredded and spread out, incineration causes a number of issues as well by creating noxious toxins that eat away slowly at our atmosphere. “Burning plastic and other wastes releases dangerous substances such as heavy metals, Persistent Organic Pollutants, and other toxics into the air and ash waste residues” (No-burn.org, 2020). New incinerator technologies are also having similar problems, as time and time again, technologies such as gasification, pyrolysis and plasma arcing (while producing a meagre energy output) are also exorbitantly expensive on top of merely harvesting the last drops of energy from this damaging refuse (No-burn.org, 2020).
While recycling plastic is a step in the right direction, it isn’t a perfect solution, either. Almost all plastic products are imprinted with one of seven resin codes, which are used by the plastics industry to indicate the general type of chemical compound used to make the product. But while these resin codes can help plastics producers to easier sort and recycle various types of plastics, there are ultimately thousands of different chemical mixtures used to create the various products we all use every day. These codes, while useful for plastics producers, are generally useless for recycling, as they were never intended to be any type of guarantee that any plastic product bearing any given code can be accepted for recycling. In fact, the term “recycling” is in itself a misnomer, and according to Eureka! Recycling the term could be more accurately stated as “downcycling” since there is always some degree of irrecoverable waste created by the current process (2020).
Let’s talk about solutions. Despite the inefficiencies, recycling still creates a more positive outcome than discarding or incinerating. But the best thing that everybody can do to reduce the negative impact of plastic use on our environment is to just use less plastic. Reducing the amount of plastic that you use reduces the demand for it, and that can reduce the amount produced in the first place. But despite that optimistic view, plastic management is still a serious problem that we will have to tackle sooner rather than later. Solutions must be made in order to wean our society off of its dependency on plastics, and we also need to find ways to safely and sustainably deal with the plastic that has already been produced. We all must keep recycling, improve recycling practices, and find more sustainable means of replacing plastics everywhere.
Plastic is everywhere. It’s time we cleaned up our mess. We need to find ourselves a better way.
Editor’s note: check out our “10 More Ideas for how You can Help Fight Climate Change” plan in the OM library today!
Earlier this week, OM featured an article describing 10 ways you can help fight climate change. Today, we’ve decided to throw in a little more friendly advice. Here are 10 more ways that you can help change our climate for the better and help keep our planet sustainable for future generations:
1) Get a home energy audit
Performing a home energy audit can show you exactly how much energy you and your family consume at home and offer you some tips as to how to make your home more efficient. Assessments like these can help homeowners save between 5 and 30% on their energy bills! Using these tips will also take a big chunk out of your own carbon footprint.
2) Install a programmable thermostat
Rather than keeping the house at a constant 21 degrees Celcius, try buying a programmable thermostat! These allow you to customize your temperature timing, so that you’re not automatically blasting the AC when you’re not at home, or you’re not overbaking your living room when everybody’s asleep! This little change only costs around $20 (unless you choose to drop $50 for the Learning Thermostat), so it’s definitely an investment worth considering.
3) Unplug electronic devices when they’re not in use
Just because your laptop looks like it isn’t drawing any power, doesn’t mean that it isn’t racking up your electric bill by idling. According to Sisson, Barber & Walker (Apr. 22, 2018) “[a]bout 25% of all residual energy consumption is used on devices in idle power mode” . These authors also recommend taking a look at disconnecting your cable box, laptop and any extra speakers whenever you’re not using them, and consider grouping appliances together on power strips, so that you can just shut all of them off easily when they’re not in use (great for leaving for a vacation).
4) Build a downspout planter box
If you live in an apartment (and you get rain often enough), then you can capture your rainwater in a planter box while growing foods like carrots or onions! Every little bit counts, and the more you capture, the more energy you save your municipal water management system, chipping away at the industrial-scale energy usage they have to contend with.
Lawns require extra watering, gas-powered equipment for upkeep, and fertilizer that pollutes waterways. If it’s possible, consider removing parts of lawn (or if you can, the entire thing for the best ecological benefits). There are more options than just a lawn for the front of your house, and Elemental.green (2020) has a couple of ideas that you might find interesting! Of course, it’s a good idea to think long and hard about how this is going to affect your house pricing before you make and radical changes.
6) Don't buy a new house, renovate an old oneOlder houses are often rife with energy inefficiencies—but Harvard’s been working on an idea. They’re aiming pretty high, too: Harvard University’s HouseZero project seeks to turn housing from the 1920s into a house that is both sustainable and affordable. According to project leader Professor of Architectural Technology Ali Malkawi, their goal is to “make a building so efficient, that the energy generated by the solar panel on the roof the power the office equipment and computers, will be almost secondary” (Curbed.com, May 25, 2017).
Talk with your community and get an urban farm started! A farm in the city of Detroit has been showing a lot of promise over the last few years, and it’s inspiring other communities to do the same. Try talking with your community leaders to see if starting your own agricultural neighbourhood is a feasible idea.
8) Eat less meat
Cattle, sheep, pigs, they all have a tendency to create a lot of methane (Moore, Sept. 10, 2007). By cutting out (or even reducing) consumption of these meats and relying more on fish or chicken, you can put a serious dent in your carbon footprint. Swapping red meats and dairy out for a more balanced diet of fish, eggs and fowl an make a big difference (Weber & Matthews, Apr. 16, 2008).
9) Don't drink bottled water
In the US alone, landfills are already overflowing with over 2 million tons of water bottles. These things take a projected 1000 years to decompose (unless they’re incinerated, which produces toxic fumes). Buy reusable water bottles and just keep filling them up. The environment will thank you for that.
Yeah, busses can be annoying and trains can get pretty crowded, but they’ll save you money as well as cut a huge chunk out your carbon footprint. One small car driving one person times 1,000,000 is a lot harder on the environment than 20 people to 1 bus times a couple thousand. More than that, taking the bus might not take quite as long as you may fear (so long as your city is keeping up-to-date).
An unhappy development in the realm of astrological discovery, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is sadly closing after a confluence of structural damages have rendered the observatory’s 305-meter-wide dish too damaged to safely repair. When one of the support cables collapsed in August earlier this year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Central Florida had made plans to repair the aging site, but when the second cable unexpectedly broke on November 6, the task of repairing the massive dish became unsafe and untenable (Grossman, Nov. 19, 2020).
The Arecibo dish, most famous for its appearances in movies such as GoldenEye and Contact, was originally used to collect radio waves from space and focus them into detectors housed in the dome suspended above the dish. Built in 1963, Arecibo was one of the best facilities in the world for collecting observations such as mysterious radio wave blasts originating from deep space (Crockett, Feb. 7, 2020), tracking near-Earth asteroids that posed a potential harm in impacting Earth (Crockett, Jan. 20, 2020) and was used by the American government’s Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program in 1992 to conduct NASA’s High Resolution Microwave Survey (Drake, May 29, 2012). The massive telescope was also used to observe the first-recorded interstellar comet 21/Borisov (Temming, Oct. 14, 2019) and had served as inspiration for students of astrometry for decades before that—not just for Puerto Rican students, but students around the globe.
While Arecibo stood for over 50 years as a testament to scientific discovery and an inspiration for us all to search the stars, the impending dismantling of the observatory is no doubt a saddening turn of events. But although this observatory may be shutting down, there are certainly more large observatories available for astronomers to continue their search (Hsu, Dec. 29, 2011):
Lamentable as it may be to see this massive telescope array to be disassembled, the search through the stars continues unhindered. Searching the infinity above will continue across a host of new places. The lessons learned from Arecibo may even turn into a handful of new and important ways for future astronomers to improve their search methods. Arecibo Observatory has already acquired its Hollywood notice—perhaps now, design innovations will help Puerto Rico’s next expansive telescopic project match or even outperform Arecibo’s legacy in the field of astronomy.
Plastic pollution is an incredibly common problem for us these days, especially when it comes to food and medical supply packaging. One of the major issues is that many of the plastics used in packaging are tailored to have a wide variety of applications, meaning that there are a massive host of different varieties of plastic compounds that need to be broken down—this doesn’t just need one quick-fix polymer for all plastics, but many different polymers to address each variety of plastic compound currently inhibiting our environment. For example, some plastics are engineered for package durability; others for temperature management; others for aesthetic appeal; others for traceability, etc. Each variety of these multilayer thermoplastics is a different chemical compound, and each one needs its own specific polymer to help break it down instead of just throwing it all into what amounts to the same incinerator.
Luckily, ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2020) reports that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have made some progress on a new method for reclaiming polymers in these materials using solvents dubbed Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP) processing. In a research paper by Walker et al. (Nov. 20, 2020), researchers describe how they’ve discovered a means to deconstruct multilayer films into their constituent resins using a series of solvent washes that are guided by thermodynamic calculations of polymer solubility. In other words, they can take these multilayer plastics and break them down into polymers that can be broken down and recycled much more easily.
By using a series of solvent washes guided by thermodynamic calculations of polymer solubility, the team from UW–Madison used the STRAP process to separate the polymers in a commercial plastic composed of common layering materials polyethylene, ethylene vinyl alcohol, and polyethylene terephthalate. The end result produced separated polymers that appear chemically similar to those used to make the original film. These new polymers demonstrate a process that can help close the recycling loop—in other words, turn those plastics into materials that can thoroughly be recycled and used again without creating extra unusable waste material after processing (Daley, Nov. 20, 2020).
STRAP uses a computational approach called the Conductor-like Screening Model for Realistic Solvents (COSMO-RS) to guide the polymer-identification process. COSMO-RS is able to calculate the solubility of target polymers in solvent mixtures at varying temperatures, narrowing down the number of potential solvents that could dissolve a polymer. The main principle underlying the STRAP process is “to selectively dissolve a single polymer layer in a solvent system in which the targeted polymer layer is soluble, but the other polymer layers are not. The solubilized polymer layer is then separated from the multilayer film by mechanical filtration and precipitated by changing the temperature and/or adding a cosolvent (an antisolvent) that renders the dissolved polymer insoluble. The solvent and antisolvent are distilled and reused in this process, and the targeted polymer layer is recovered as a dry, pure solid” (Walker et al., Nov. 20, 2020). This process can then be repeated for each layer of polymer, resulting in creating segregated streams that can then be easily recycled.
The research team’s ultimate goal is to develop a computational system that will allow researchers to catalogue solvent combinations to help recycle all sorts of different varieties of plastics. By having a list of different varieties of plastics that can be cross-referenced with a list of breakdown solvents, researchers hope to be able in the near future to break down every listed variety of plastic available.
Consider this a master plan for breaking down every type of plastic imaginable. Having a fully developed system like this could be a key step in finding reliable methods to break down all pollutant plastics currently in production. Having that system in place could potentially revolutionize recycling processes, and that could wind up making significant progress in global efforts to combat pollution and climate change.
Environmental toxification is a global threat that grows daily, and it’s gotten harder and harder to ignore. Here are ten small changes that you can make to help change our climate for the better and help keep our planet sustainable for future generations:
Not too long ago, solar panels were seen as a bit of a ludicrous luxury—but that stigma is not sticking. The price of solar panels has decreased dramatically (about 89%) over the past 10 years (Sisson, Barber & Walker, Apr. 22, 2020), and let’s be honest: energy companies already make enough off of powering the rest of the world already as is. But the main point here is that both hardware costs for the actual panels as well as soft costs (installation, permits, setting up electrical meters to measure usage, etc.) have also declined steadily (thesolarnerd.com, Jan. 16, 2020). These will decrease the amount of energy your home takes from your electric company, which will reduce their total output, and with enough public application, can drastically reduce the electric company’s emissions output. But so much more than that: it’s cheaper in the long run. So save yourself some money down the road, and feel good about doing it, too!
2. Switch out your old lightbulbs for LEDs
High quality LED bulbs can last up to 25 times longer, while also using at least 75% less energy than other bulbs. While these bulbs might be a little bit more expensive just for purchasing, they can wind up cutting your energy bill drastically. For more information on new varieties of LED bulbs, check out energy.gov to learn more!
3. Replace your HVAC filters every 3 months
A dirty air filtration system will make your furnace work harder to heat your home over the winter. A harder-working home will cost you in energy, so regularly replacing your air filter will ensure that your furnace is working as little as possible to do the job (energystar.gov, 2020).
4. Wash your clothes in cold water
Approximately 75% of the total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions produced from a single load of laundry come from just warming the water itself (Sisson, Barber & Walker, Apr. 22, 2020). Spare yourself the energy costs! Besides, in a lot of cases, using cold water can be just as effective as using hot water to do your laundry (Martin & Rosenthal, Sept. 16, 2011).
5. Recycle your clothes
Fast fashion is wasteful! The environmental costs of manufacturing and distributing new clothes is pretty harsh—in fact according to a 2010 Textile World article, fashion accounts for about 10% of global emissions (Cutter, Aug. 18, 2016). Donating or giving away your old, used clothing will help to reduce the demand on new clothing, and some retailers will actually purchase, refurbish and resell your old clothing (Gunther, Aug. 9, 2016), taking another little piece of the demand away from textile manufacturing costs.
6. Design your workplace around natural light
Are you working from home right now? Do you need that lamp on to keep working? Keeping a clean and organized workspace that utilizes natural sunlight instead of artificial will save you a little change on energy costs, reduce your total energy needs just a touch (Barber, Apr. 2, 2020), and it might even make your workplace a little bit more enjoyable, too!
7. Insulate your home
Making your home more energy-efficient will reduce the amount of power required to keep it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Adequate insulation, weather stripping and caulking around your home can even save you up to 25% on your energy bills (West, Nov. 10, 2020)!
8. Hang-dry your clothes instead of using the dryer
Hang drying your clothes might be a bit of a hassle, but doing so can save you on average up to 3.3% on your energy bills (Hughes, Apr. 12, 2007). Every little bit counts, and doing this over time can reduce any damage people can do to the environment, as well as can wind up saving you quite a bit of cash in the long run.
9. Plant a community garden
Not only is this a great way to mingle with your neighbours, this can also have some larger affects by offering your community a chance to participate in a community project that will help the entire community reduce their global footprint! Check out the American Community Garden Association’s webpage for some basic tips to help you get started on this community project!
10. Check your carbon footprint
Use this handy online tool provided by Nature.org to calculate the total amount of greenhouse gases that are generated by your actions. Be warned, you might find yourself unpleasantly surprised (transportation does a lot), but the site can also give you more tips on how to reduce your negative impact on the environment as well (Nature.org, 2020)!
Over the past week, OM has been diving deep into how some of the main contributors of climate change manage to find ways around regulations to continue receiving massive profits at the ultimate expense of the environment. Today we’ll be wrapping this little investigation up, and we’re going to draw some conclusions on how we can proceed while making stronger efforts to clean up our act using one of the most powerful tools at our disposal: government regulation.
WHAT’S BEEN ESTABLISHED?
In part 2 of our Government Oversight series, we discovered that ESG ratings across various companies seem to be rather subjective. This winds up creating a series of sweeping differences in the analytical rigor these ratings systems use to determine varying companies’ actual environmental output. In other words, some companies are held to a very high standard, while others are not. Timothy Doyle at investors.com (Aug. 9, 2018) has noted that various ESG rating systems are often “fraught with problems, from inconsistent metrics, to ratings which continually fail to account for different regulatory regimes across distinct geographies”. Doyle later comments in his article how ESG rating agencies often “use the same fixed scoring criteria for companies in different countries, despite the fact that they are subject to varying regulatory and disclosure regimes”. As one example, Doyle later remarks how Tesla was outperformed on ESG ratings by Volkwagen, despite BMW AG, Volkswagen AG, Audi AG, Porsche AG, Daimler AG and their U.S. affiliates being criminally accused of “sharing commercially sensitive information and reaching illegal agreements about vehicle attributes including technology, costs, suppliers and emissions equipment” (Chiem, Law360, May 18, 2018). Doyle also remarks how “more often than not agencies assign ratings to companies based on industry, without actually factoring in company-specific risks. The utilities sector, for example, has been given the highest mean ESG score by Sustainalytics, while healthcare has been assigned the worst” (Aug. 9, 2018).
THE HEART OF THE ISSUE
This inconsistency is at the heart of the government oversight issue that this project has focussed on. By allowing for a business environment of sporadic and inconsistent testing, governmental organizations have given larger, more powerful organizations a leg up in their own efforts to maintain a high profit margin at the expense of the environment. This creates a conflict of interests that is directly in favor of maintaining corporate profits at the ultimate expense of global environmental sustainability efforts. These ESG rating systems must then be improved.
HOW CAN WE FIX THIS?
To improve these ESG rating systems, we need to ensure that the testing methodology is audited for consistency across various corporate and governmental sectors to ensure that these rating systems accurately reflect how these various organizations have succeeded or failed in their attempts to meet the standards put into place by government officials. The onus then falls to governments to ensure that legislation they create accurately enforces beneficial change in arguably every business and government sector that has historically had a major deleterious impact on the environment.
We need to make sure that the government is doing its job to make sure that large companies are not getting away with shirking their responsibilities concerning environmental protection. And this problem is hardly limited to any one country. ESG ratings have serious repercussions on how both businesses and governments operate, and those operations directly affect how each business or government affects the environment at large. By calling for changes in how ESG ratings are collected and analyzed, we can push for greater action towards protecting our environment and securing a sustainable planet for future generations.
TAKE ACTION
For Canadian readers, you can make your voice heard by contacting the government of Canada’s Commitments Board by adding your input to the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy by following the above link. Readers of other nations are strongly urged to take similar efforts in their own countries by voicing their concern towards monied interests manipulating testing data for their own interests at the expense of our world.
In OM’s earlier post about “Appropriately Enforcing Government Regulations on Sustainability”, we investigated a strange issue where Exxon Mobil (the giant oil production conglomerate) statistically outperformed the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP). Since Exxon Mobil is a direct contributor to some of the main environmental issues we face today, and MassDEP is responsible for fixing those problems, this issue seems like there are some motivations that aren’t entirely clear: how does an oil producer outperform a regulatory institution designed specifically to reduce the negative environmental impact of other companies on environmental statistics? Something seems off.
While MassDEP works to reduce pollution, Exxon Mobil directly profits off of feeding the cycle of pollution that is directly tied into transportation. If we consider motivations, profit drives demand that Exxon Mobil make more profit from polluting—maybe by skirting some regulatory rules. There shouldn’t be any question at all about this—the statistics should show that Exxon Mobil should definitely be doing worse than MassDEP. But the reverse is apparently true. Personally, I’d question the statistics first.
PROBLEMS WITH THE STATS
Sara Meyers, Education Program Manager at MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) originally thought a starting point could be rating whether or not companies were environmentally minded using environmental social governance (ESG) rating. But ESG ratings have been questioned for there being “too much variety in what categories are included in different ESG ratings and in how those categories are measured for them to be of much use” (Gribkoff, Nov. 9, 2020). The same article mentions how Christopher Noga, a computer science, economics, and data science major at MIT “could only find emissions data for about a third of the companies, and many private companies did not have publicly available financial statements”. Later in that article, it mentions how “[m]ining, fossil fuel, and manufacturing companies have the highest emissions intensity scores, while technology, health care, and government agencies have the lowest scores”. I mean, that’s just logical.
So how do the statistics show the exact opposite result?
In a paper by the MIT Sloan School of Management, authors Berg, Koelbel & Rigobon (August 15, 2019) found that ESG ratings were not as concrete as had been hoped, and that a substantial divergence existed between various ESG raters for various companies. Given the fact that Meyers noted how many of the employers who filled out ESG surveys
“responded with ‘I don't know’ rather than an outright no” (Gribkoff, Nov. 9, 2020), it seems that these ESG surveys might allow for a little too much vagueness than is required.
WHY ARE THE STATS SO VARIED?
The next question that follows then, is why are vague or inadequate surveys being used to determine ESG results? According to Sustainable Insight Capital Management (February, 2016), “ESG rating agencies are…equivalent to over $20 trillion [of all professionally-run assets globally]”. One complaint from ESG data providers raises the issue of transparency, and that “proprietary research methods are commercially valuable and need to be kept secret” (p. 5).
The question that arises next naturally casts a little bit of shade on ESG data providers: which is more important to the globe—any given company’s profit margins, or the planet’s overall health?
This looks like it’s the crux of the issue: environmental social governance (ESG) ratings are apparently plagued with inconsistency. But to determine scientifically what a company’s environmental output truly is, consistency in testing across various companies is absolutely essential. Basically, the tests are screwed up, and companies like Exxon Mobil have profited off of that.
SO HOW DO WE FIX THE TESTS?
We need to repair the inaccurate ESG rating system. Jaqueline Poh at Bloomberg.com reports that “[ESG] ratings providers say their systems will improve significantly only if companies worldwide are forced to report relevant sustainability data” (December 11, 2019). She later reports how the “EU currently requires large companies to regularly publish reports on the social and environmental impacts of their operations. The China Securities Regulatory Commission is making it mandatory for all listed companies and bond issuers to disclose ESG risks by 2020. But the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial regulator for the world’s biggest economy, doesn’t require corporate disclosure of material ESG data”.
So why don’t American companies need to regularly report ESG ratings? Moreover, why are these ratings so notoriously inconsistent? To answer these questions, we need to turn our attention to those who made the ESG rating system in the first place.
Stick around for our closing piece on this, where we finally discover who the real culprits of these stagnated testing methods really are, what their motivation is, and how to fix the issues they’ve caused!
Our heroes face authority! Andy & the boys rough it in prison, the girls make a daring escape, and Damon is reunited with some long-lost family.
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