Daily Quick Read - August 14, 2019

More Fracking, More Oil, More Plastic

                                                                            Ross Mantle for The New York Times

Suffice it to say, Trump was quite happy to visit this facility on Tuesday. His obsession with fossil fuels is frightening. Natural gas isn’t quite as bad as oil, but creating another Houston or Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, pumping massive quantities of green house gases into the atmosphere and flooding the world with single use plastics is not what we need.

It has been about 15 years since hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, took hold in Pennsylvania, which sits atop the huge gas reserve of the Marcellus Shale. But natural gas prices have collapsed and profit must be found elsewhere, namely the natural gas byproduct ethane, which is unleashed during fracking and can be made into polyethylene, a common form of plastic.

The region’s natural gas deposits had been seen, for a time, as its new road to prosperity, with drilling in the Marcellus Shale reservoir transforming Pennsylvania into the nation’s No. 2 natural gas state. But drops in the price of oil and gas caused the initial jobs boom from fracking to fizzle, leading companies like Shell to turn instead to plastics and so-called cracker plants — named after the process in which molecules are broken down at high heat, turning fracked ethane gas into one of the precursors for plastic.

The company was given massive tax breaks to build the petrochemicals complex, along with a $10 million site development grant, with local politicians eager to accommodate a multibillion-dollar construction project.

White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump would be touring the plant and delivering remarks “touting his Administration’s economic accomplishments and support for America’s expanding domestic manufacturing and energy production.” Shell announced its plans to build the complex in 2012, when President Barack Obama was in office.

But “fracking for plastic” has drawn alarm from environmentalists and other activists, who warn of potential health and safety risks to nearby residents and bemoan the production of ever more plastic. There has been growing alarm over the sheer quantity of plastic on the planet, which has overwhelmed landfills, inundated bodies of water and permeated the deepest reaches of the ocean. Microplastics have also been found in the bodies of birds, fish, whales and people, with the health impacts largely unknown.

While many in town see the plant as an economic lifeline, other local residents, community organizations and public health advocates are planning a protest Tuesday to coincide with Trump’s visit. Cheryl Johncox, a local organizer with the Sierra Club who lives in Ohio, said she expects several hundred people to attend to voice opposition to the plant, as well as demonstrate against Trump’s immigration and gun policies.

In addition to concerns about the safety of their air and groundwater, her group has heard from residents “dismayed these facilities will create single-use plastic,” she said.

It’s Not Our Fault Say Head of EPA

What’s going to happen to all that single use plastic that comes from the massive new plants currently under construction?  According to the head of the EPA, it’s not the US’s fault that other countries can’t manage their plastic waste.  Or maybe it is, Andrew.

"Sixty percent of the world's marine litter comes from six Asian countries," Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said from the White House. "We have the technology and the expertise to help these nations."

The next day, Indonesia rejected dozens of shipping containers full of waste exported by wealthy nations—including the United States—after inspections revealed the containers were contaminated with plastics, diapers, used electronics, and other hazardous wastes. Indonesia is hardly the first country to crack down on contaminated imports: China, once the largest importer of plastic scrap, upended the (largely overlooked) global trade of plastic waste last year when it stopped buying shipments of recyclables that weren't at least 99.5 percent pure. Paper, plastics, and other recyclable materials began piling up in waste management centers and landfills in the U.S. and other western nations, exposing the shortcomings of our own waste systems.

Globally, half of the world's plastic scrap is traded on the international market. The U.S. exports about a third of its recyclables every year, and once they're shipped abroad, they're classified as recycled, but there's no guarantee that all of plastic scrap actually makes it into new materials. The vast majority—78 percent—of the U.S.'s plastic waste exports go to countries with poor waste management systems such as Malaysia, where Greenpeace documented reports of illegal dumping and burning of materials meant to be recycled. "The actual amount of U.S. plastic waste that ends in countries with poor waste management may be even higher than 78 percent," according to the Plastic Pollution Coalition, "since countries like Canada and South Korea may reexport U.S. plastic waste."

"This is a classic example of this idea that you can externalize your environmental footprint by moving the problem somewhere else," says George Leonard, chief scientist at the non-profit advocacy group Ocean Conservancy.

Plastic Rain

Rain falling on the Rocky Mountains contains microplastics. This is what happens as more and more plastic end up dumped in the oceans or piled up as plastic mountains in some of the world’s poorest countries.

Plastic was the furthest thing from Gregory Wetherbee’s mind when he began analyzing rainwater samples collected from the Rocky Mountains. “I guess I expected to see mostly soil and mineral particles,” said the US Geological Survey researcher.

Instead, he found multicolored microscopic plastic fibers.The discovery, published in a recent study (pdf) titled “It is raining plastic”, raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth.

“I think the most important result that we can share with the American public is that there’s more plastic out there than meets the eye,” said Wetherbee. “It’s in the rain, it’s in the snow. It’s a part of our environment now.”

Rainwater samples collected across Colorado and analyzed under a microscope contained a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards. The findings shocked Wetherbee, who had been collecting the samples in order to study nitrogen pollution.

"My results are purely accidental,” he said, though they are consistent with another recent study that found microplastics in the Pyrenees, suggesting plastic particles could travel with the wind for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. Other studies have turned up microplastics in the deepest reaches of the ocean, in UK lakes and rivers and in US groundwater.

Animals and humans consume microplastics via water and food, and we likely breathe in micro- and nanoplastic particles in the air, though scientists have yet to understand the health effects. Microplastics can also attract and attach to heavy metals like mercury and other hazardous chemicals, as well as toxic bacteria. “Plastic particles from furniture and carpets could contain flame retardants that are toxic to humans,” Krause said.

Filling Up the Great Lakes

Microplastics in Rocky Mountain rainwater and now they are showing up in the Great Lakes.  So much of what we touch and what touches us includes or is made of plastics it’s hard to imagine a world without them so the good news is, they will never be gone.

A new contaminant has turned up in western Lake Superior — tiny snarls, tangles and shreds of plastic that are appearing by the hundreds of thousands, mystifying scientists and Minnesota pollution regulators. 

While the level of debris doesn’t approach the microplastic soup found near Hawaii, a gyre known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it does exceed what’s been found in the north Atlantic Ocean. The discovery has prompted researchers at the University of Minnesota, Duluth to expand testing to other Minnesota lakes and the fish that inhabit them.

The exact source of the microplastics remains something of a puzzle, and it’s not clear yet how to gauge their impact on people, aquatic life and the environment. “It’s on the earliest slope of emerging as an environmental issue,” said Catherine Neuschler, a manager at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

But plastics are very slow to degrade, meaning they could survive in nature indefinitely.

“This is a huge issue,” said Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul, an influential legislator on environmental issues. “I have yet to find one person who wants to drink plastics.”

Researchers at UMD’s Large Lakes Observatory published their findings last year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. They’ve just launched a new study of inland lakes and fish, which were not part of the Lake Superior research. 

Plastic People 

Even if we could put the brakes on single use plastics, we are going to live with the residual microplastic contamination for decades.  And, what are the chances that the world stops consuming the all the items wrapped up in plastics?  This is what’s going in right now, but this article also has some suggestions on what individuals can do to reduce their ingestion of microplastics.

One research review published in June calculated that just by eating, drinking, and breathing, the average American ingests at least 74,000 microplastic particles every year. (Microplastic particles are defined as 5 millimeters at their largest; most of the ones we ingest are far smaller.) And that analysis looked at only 15 percent of the foods in an average diet, meaning the amount of plastic we consume through food could actually be far greater.

Another recent study commissioned by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund) and conducted by researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia estimated that the average person consumes about 5 grams of plastic a week—roughly the equivalent of a credit card. (That work is still under review.)

There is evidence, at least in animals, that microplastics can cross the hardy membrane protecting the brain from many foreign bodies that get into the bloodstream. And there’s some evidence that mothers may be able to pass microplastics through the placenta to a developing fetus, according to research that has not yet been published but was presented at a spring conference at the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability.

According to Myers, some of these microplastic particles could potentially also leach bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. Flaws says the particles can accumulate PCBs, other chemicals that are linked to harmful health effects, including various cancers, a weakened immune system, reproductive problems, and more.

And once these chemicals are inside of us, even low doses have an effect.

Bisphenols are known to interfere with hormones, Flaws says. There are studies linking bisphenol exposure to reduced fertility in men and women, she says. Phthalates are also known to disrupt hormones, and prenatal exposure to phthalates is linked to lower testosterone in male offspring, she says. Styrene, another chemical found in plastic and some food packaging, has been linked to a number of health issues, including nervous system problems, hearing loss, and cancer.