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Abandoned Wells, Methane-Emission Loopholes and Underground Toxic Waste Dumps All Raise Concerns

Here are the world’s top banks financing fossil fuels — is yours on the list? The post Abandoned Wells, Methane-Emission Loopholes and Underground Toxic Waste Dumps All Raise Concerns appeared first on .

Welcome to “Feet to the Fire: Big Oil and the Climate Crisis,” a biweekly newsletter in which we share our latest reporting on how the fossil fuel industry drives climate change and influences climate policy in five of the nation’s most important oil and gas-producing states. In addition, we shine a spotlight on the financing of the fossil fuel industry, holding banks and other financial institutions accountable for their role and providing you with updates on their activities. Click here to subscribe to the newsletter on Substack. Thousands of Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells in Texas Are Polluting the Environment There are more than 8,400 orphan oil and gas wells in Texas — but that barely scratches the surface since that count doesn’t include an unknown number of abandoned wells that are more than a century old and cannot be found in state records. Many of them are leaking produced water, hydrocarbons and gas to the surface and threatening groundwater, and that represents an existential threat to Schuyler Wight, a West Texas rancher who told Capital & Main’s Elliott Woods that he has about 250 aging and derelict wells on his land, and he’s frustrated by the state’s lack of attention to the problem. “How Do You Approve an Underground Toxic Waste Dump Without Telling Nobody?” It was a shock to Mario Atencio when he discovered that an oil and gas company was planning to convert a water well into a disposal site for toxic wastewater less than a mile from his family home in New Mexico. He asks, “How do you approve an underground toxic waste dump without telling nobody?” Atencio, who has long been fighting oil and gas development on ancestral Native lands, told Capital & Main’s Jerry Redfern that he “kind of freaked out” when he learned of the planned conversion, which will likely get nixed in a pending decision by the New Mexico State Land Commissioner. California’s Plan for a Green Hydrogen Future Carries Risks, Say Critics California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to ramp up the use of renewable hydrogen is raising concerns among environmentalists, who cite the risk of increased emissions and pollution. The state was approved by the U.S. Department of Energy for a $1.2 billion hydrogen hub investment, and critics worry that hydrogen supporters are “pushing California into a risky regulatory framework, motivated by financial incentives” in President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, reports Capital & Main’s Aaron Cantú. Loophole in New Mexico Law May Allow Methane Releases Despite the passage of a 2021 law that bans routine venting and flaring of natural gas, exceptions for pipeline operators paved the way for the release of millions of cubic feet of the potent greenhouse gas in January and February — their highest levels since the so-called Methane Rule was approved. The amount vented by pipeline company Targa Northern Delaware was equivalent to the carbon footprint of nearly 26,000 gasoline-powered cars driven for an entire year, reports Jerry Redfern. New Report Names the World’s Top Banks Financing Fossil Fuels JPMorgan is the globe’s top fossil fuel financier, committing $40.8 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2023, per the 15th annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, which provides a window into lending and underwriting to more than 4,200 oil and gas and coal companies. Altogether, the world’s 60 largest private banks have provided nearly $7 trillion in financing to fossil fuel companies since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. Almost half of that amount — $3.3 trillion — went into expanding fossil fuel production. The top bank funding such expansion activities is Citigroup, which has provided $204 billion since 2016. The annual report is released by seven climate groups, including Oil Change International, Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Reclaim Finance, Sierra Club and Urgewald. Among other highlights of the report: Some banks have rolled back policies that were intended to reduce their financing of fossil fuel production. For example, Bank of America, ranked third on the 2023 list of “worst fossil fuel funders,” has dropped its exclusions on Arctic drilling, thermal coal and coal-fired power plants, per the report. Financing for coal mining in 2023 increased slightly over 2022, with most of the financing provided by banks located in China. Bank of America was one of several banks that made commitments of $2.54 billion in total to 48 companies around the world that are active in metallurgical coal mining. Financing for liquefied natural gas increased to $120.9 billion in 2023, led by banks such as RBC, JPMorgan Chase and Mizuho Financial. Report: Barclays Is Greenwashing Billions of Dollars in “Sustainable Finance” Amid increased scrutiny of sustainable and transition finance, with concerns that funds intended for companies that agree to meet climate-related targets are actually being used to finance polluting activities, a new investigative exposé by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that Barclays helped raise $41 billion in sustainability-linked finance for fossil fuel companies last year. The revelation prompted one of the bank’s investors, Andrew Harper of investment manager Epworth, to call the bank “totally dishonest,” adding: “We’re concerned because the bank is making such a substantial claim and the public thinks the climate emergency is being worked towards being solved. Meanwhile, the problem is getting worse and worse.” Barclays told the BIJ that “Sustainability linked loans and bonds are an important sustainable finance tool, incentivizing borrowers, particularly in hard to abate sectors, to achieve sustainability objectives over time.” EU’s Largest Bank Stops Underwriting Bonds for Oil and Gas Producers BNP Paribas SA, the biggest bank in the European Union, said that it has stopped underwriting bonds for oil and gas producers, one of the biggest steps taken to reduce fossil fuel financing by financial institutions. The change comes amid stricter ESG regulations in Europe and a lawsuit against the bank’s financing activities that was brought by climate activists last year. BNP has increased its use of sustainable finance and is currently the biggest underwriter of green bonds in the world, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BNP’s decision “sets them apart from other international banks,” Lucie Pinson, director of Reclaim Finance, a Paris-based climate nonprofit, told Bloomberg. Australia’s Top Banks Now All Rule Out Project Financing for New Oil and Gas Fields One of Australia’s biggest lenders, ANZ, announced it would no longer provide direct financing to new or expanded oil and gas fields as well as new LNG export plants. With the announcement, the continent’s four biggest banks — ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB, and Westpac — have closed the door on project financing for new oil and gas fields. Amid pressure from shareholders and climate activists, ANZ won’t be financing a controversial LNG project in Papua New Guinea that is being developed by TotalEnergies, Santos and ExxonMobil. As part of its broader climate strategy, ANZ is requiring its 100 biggest customers to make progress on their transition plans. U.S. Oil and Gas Producers Seeing “a Lot More Interest From the Bank Community”  Though foreign banks have pulled back from the oil and gas industry in the face of sustainability concerns, other lenders are jumping back in, Michael Bodino, managing director of investment banking at Texas Capital Bank, told Hart Energy: “We’re seeing a lot more interest from the bank community broadly to get new credits in their portfolios.” In addition, pension and insurance companies in pursuit of a return on their investment are looking to the upstream sector (referring to the exploration and extraction segment of the industry). In addition, the leveraged loan market, which goes principally to borrowers with high levels of debt, has been active in the industry, said Bodino. Copyright 2024 Capital & Main

Harnessing Biosorption: Turning Brewery Waste Into a Water Purification Powerhouse

A filter made from brewery waste yeast encapsulated in hydrogels can quickly absorb lead from contaminated water. Beer breweries generate and discard thousands of tons...

Engineered yeast-containing hydrogel capsules could be used to remove lead from contaminated water rapidly and inexpensively. The work, from MIT and Georgia Tech researchers, could be especially useful in low-income areas with high lead contamination. Credit: Courtesy of the researchersA filter made from brewery waste yeast encapsulated in hydrogels can quickly absorb lead from contaminated water.Beer breweries generate and discard thousands of tons of surplus yeast every year. Researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech have now come up with a way to repurpose that yeast for extracting lead from polluted water.Using a process known as biosorption, the yeast efficiently absorbs trace and larger amounts of lead and other heavy metals from water. The researchers have successfully packaged the yeast in hydrogel capsules, forming a filter that removes lead from water. These encapsulated yeast cells can easily be removed from the water, making it safe for consumption. Effective and Sustainable Technology“We have the hydrogel surrounding the free yeast that exists in the center, and this is porous enough to let water come in, interact with yeast as if they were freely moving in water, and then come out clean,” says Patricia Stathatou, a former postdoc at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, who is now a research scientist at Georgia Tech and an incoming assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “The fact that the yeast themselves are bio-based, benign, and biodegradable is a significant advantage over traditional technologies.”The researchers envision that this process could be used to filter drinking water coming out of a faucet in homes, or scaled up to treat large quantities of water at treatment plants.MIT graduate student Devashish Gokhale and Stathatou are the lead authors of the study, which was published on May 15 in the journal RSC Sustainability. Patrick Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, is the senior author of the paper, and Christos Athanasiou, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech and a former visiting scholar at MIT, is also an author.Absorbing LeadThe new study builds on work that Stathatou and Athanasiou began in 2021, when Athanasiou was a visiting scholar at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. That year, they calculated that waste yeast discarded from a single brewery in Boston would be enough to treat the city’s entire water supply.Through biosorption, a process that is not fully understood, yeast cells can bind to and absorb heavy metal ions, even at challenging initial concentrations below 1 part per million. The MIT team found that this process could effectively decontaminate water with low concentrations of lead. However, one key obstacle remained, which was how to remove yeast from the water after they absorb the lead.In a serendipitous coincidence, Stathatou and Athanasiou happened to present their research at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Boston in 2021, where Gokhale, a student in Doyle’s lab, was presenting his own research on using hydrogels to capture micropollutants in water. The two sets of researchers decided to join forces and explore whether the yeast-based strategy could be easier to scale up if the yeast were encapsulated in hydrogels developed by Gokhale and Doyle.“What we decided to do was make these hollow capsules — something like a multivitamin pill, but instead of filling them up with vitamins, we fill them up with yeast cells,” Gokhale says. “These capsules are porous, so the water can go into the capsules and the yeast are able to bind all of that lead, but the yeast themselves can’t escape into the water.”The capsules are made from a polymer called polyethylene glycol (PEG), which is widely used in medical applications. To form the capsules, the researchers suspend freeze-dried yeast in water, then mix them with the polymer subunits. When UV light is shone on the mixture, the polymers link together to form capsules with yeast trapped inside.Each capsule is about half a millimeter in diameter. Because the hydrogels are very thin and porous, water can easily pass through and encounter the yeast inside, while the yeast remain trapped.In this study, the researchers showed that the encapsulated yeast could remove trace lead from water just as rapidly as the unencapsulated yeast from Stathatou and Athanasiou’s original 2021 study.Scaling UpLed by Athanasiou, the researchers tested the mechanical stability of the hydrogel capsules and found that the capsules and the yeast inside can withstand forces similar to those generated by water running from a faucet. They also calculated that the yeast-laden capsules should be able to withstand forces generated by flows in water treatment plants serving several hundred residences.“Lack of mechanical robustness is a common cause of failure of previous attempts to scale-up biosorption using immobilized cells; in our work, we wanted to make sure that this aspect is thoroughly addressed from the very beginning to ensure scalability,” Athanasiou says.After assessing the mechanical robustness of the yeast-laden capsules, the researchers constructed a proof-of-concept packed-bed biofilter, capable of treating trace lead-contaminated water and meeting U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking water guidelines while operating continuously for 12 days.This process would likely consume less energy than existing physicochemical processes for removing trace inorganic compounds from water, such as precipitation and membrane filtration, the researchers say.This approach, rooted in circular economy principles, could minimize waste and environmental impact while also fostering economic opportunities within local communities. Although numerous lead contamination incidents have been reported in various locations in the United States, this approach could have an especially significant impact in low-income areas that have historically faced environmental pollution and limited access to clean water, and may not be able to afford other ways to remediate it, the researchers say.“We think that there’s an interesting environmental justice aspect to this, especially when you start with something as low-cost and sustainable as yeast, which is essentially available anywhere,” Gokhale says.Future ProspectsThe researchers are now exploring strategies for recycling and replacing the yeast once they’re used up, and trying to calculate how often that will need to occur. They also hope to investigate whether they could use feedstocks derived from biomass to make the hydrogels, instead of fossil-fuel-based polymers, and whether the yeast can be used to capture other types of contaminants.“Moving forward, this is a technology that can be evolved to target other trace contaminants of emerging concern, such as PFAS or even microplastics,” Stathatou says. “We really view this as an example with a lot of potential applications in the future.”Reference: “Yeast-laden hydrogel capsules for scalable trace lead removal from water” by Devashish Gokhale, Patritsia M. Stathatou, Christos E. Athanasiou and Patrick S. Doyle, 15 May 2024, RSC Sustainability.DOI: 10.1039/D4SU00052HThe research was funded by the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), and the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Tech.

Giant Heaps of Plastic Are Helping Vegetables Grow

Plastic allows farmers to use less water and fertilizer. But at the end of each season, they’re left with a pile of waste.

Each year, on our fruit-and-vegetable farm in New England, my family covers about a quarter of our 50 acres with plastic mulch. Rolls of it, five feet wide and 4,000 feet long, sit on a machine that my father and I cordially call the plastic layer. From the back of a tractor, it feeds out the mulch over a perfectly raised bed, before turning soil onto the plastic’s edges to hold it tightly for the growing season. At the end of each row, the machine stops and raises up. I walk over, throw my leg across a three-foot-wide mound, and plunge my shovel through the thin layer of plastic until it’s free from the tractor. Over the next few months, tomatoes, squashes, and melons will grow in these beds much more efficiently because of the mulch. But at the end of the growing season, we will be left with a heap of used and useless plastic.We will return to the fields and slice the rows down the center, gripping one flap at a time and wiggling, pulling, kicking the buried edge out from under the soil. By the end of a row, the plastic—already tattered by weeds, degraded by the sun’s ultraviolet rays, and caught by feet and tractor tires—has ripped countless times. I try to roll it up neatly, but thin plastic coated in dirt, plant remnants, rotten tomatoes, and a slime of biofilm is nothing neat. I drive to a corner of the farm and dump the plastic on the same pile that my grandfather started 40 years ago.Growing on plastic mulches has been the industry standard for decades. It makes the most sense financially for farmers; in many ways, it makes the most sense environmentally, too. Using plastic mulch saves water; it reduces the use of chemical pesticides; it increases a farm’s yield. It also means that each year the United States must somehow dispose of more than 100 million pounds of plastic—at times, the annual total has been estimated to be upwards of 200 million pounds—easily enough plastic to cover most or all of Rhode Island.Mulches and other agricultural plastics just scratch the surface of the world’s plastic problem. Packaging, textiles, cars, and every other sector that depends on plastic produces waste. But because plastic mulches are typically too thin and too dirty to easily recycle, it is frequently infeasible or too expensive to turn them into new plastic mulches. Most become garbage, a single-use plastic whose utility is tough to replicate but that creates intractable waste.In Florida, where the sun shines warmer than at home, the rows of plastic stretch out farther, touching the horizons. There plastic is laid daily in quantities that would cover the entirety of my family’s farm. Buddy Hill manages thousands of acres of tomatoes, and he told me that “you can’t make the yield on bare ground that you can on plastic. It’s a night-and-day difference.” The benefits for each crop vary, but for tomatoes, studies have found increases in yield by as much as a third when tomatoes are grown on plastic mulch instead of bare ground, a comparable increase to most of the plant’s fruit and vegetable counterparts.In other words, plastics in agriculture, or plasticulture, changed what was considered possible for fruit and vegetable crops. Plastics cover greenhouses and allow for growing beyond the constraints of seasons. Small plastic tubes laid beneath the plastic mulch slowly drip water to the area where the crops need it, improving irrigation and using water up to 80 percent more efficiently than aboveground systems. Lower water volumes wash fewer fertilizers out of the soil and into local waterways and ecosystems. Plastic mulch also moderates soil temperature and disease prevalence. And it keeps weeds in check: Under those thin plastics, the heat and lack of light kills any weeds that begin to sprout. Fewer weeds means fewer chemicals needed to control weed growth, and fewer hours spent pulling weeds by hand.Alternatives to plastic mulch—mainly, biodegradable plastic mulches—do exist. But they are more expensive and, depending on the crop and the climate, may degrade more or less quickly than the farmer needs them to. Farmers either lose the benefit of the mulches when they degrade too quickly, or end up with intact mulches that restrict their ability to cultivate later crops. Agricultural areas in California and Florida, where planting happens multiple times each year, need plastic that can be completely removed for quick crop turnarounds.Plasticulture fits better in the system of commercial agriculture, designed to feed people efficiently. Small-scale, highly labor-intensive farms might be able to avoid both plastic use and industrially refined fertilizers and pesticides. But as long as the economics of growing food in places with ample space and shipping it around the country make sense, the mounds of dirty plastic will keep accumulating. Courtesy of John Gove Farmers have a few other options. Piling up used plastic in a corner of the farm might work at first for small operations, but as the pile grows, pieces ride the wind and end up in neighboring fields, forests, and waterways. Eventually the pile of old plastic needs to be disposed of. On our farm, as on many other Massachusetts farms, that pile—40 years’ worth of mulch—was hauled away to a landfill or incinerator one dumpster at a time. In other states, including Florida, where open burning is allowed, black smoke billows from piles scattered across farms—another stream of carbon pumping into the atmosphere. Plastic is a product of fossil fuels; both its creation and disposal make it one of the biggest contributions to global warming.In Stuttgart, Arkansas—Rice and Duck Capital of the World, a welcome sign declares—Revolution Sustainable Solutions is making recycling work. The company gathers dirty plastic from the miles of surrounding farmland, as well as from collection centers throughout the Midwest, then chops the plastic into manageable pieces, washes it, shreds it into flakes, washes it again, and dries it. The company then extrudes the flakes into plastic resins, much of which becomes trash bags.These thin products could be ruined if a grain of sand made its way into the production line. So Revolution focuses on collecting polytube (used for irrigation) and silage bags, the long, tall, caterpillar-looking tubes that store animal feed, both of which are thicker than plastic mulches and therefore less contaminated. The greater surface area of plastic mulch holds more dirt; some mulches, to increase their strength and reduce their thickness, are embossed with a pattern that holds on to even more contamination. Plastic recycling generally follows the same script: Take something large and dirty, chop and clean it, then extrude. But whereas polytube and silage bags might be worth washing to recycle, used plastic mulch can be up to 80 percent contamination by weight, requiring extensive cleaning. It usually costs more to recycle than it does to make it new.Karl Englund, an environmental-engineering professor and extension specialist at Washington State University, specializes in exactly this type of low-value feedstock. One key to making mulch viable for recycling, he told me, could be to find outlets that do not require clean feedstock. Mulch could be turned into highway barriers, for instance, or specialized incinerator fuel, which, in the right environment, burns cleaner than coal. Or the mulch could be dry-cleaned, or gathered in a way that helps it leave the field with less contamination. Most of these ideas, though, are still in an experimental phase.As spring arrives on my family’s Massachusetts farm, we are organizing our supply of plastic mulches. Black rolls for early crops, helping to warm the soils; white ones for the mid-season crops, reflecting some of the sun’s heat; and biodegradable mulches for the melons and other crops that sprawl and naturally retain soil moisture and suppress weeds once established. A few remnants of last year’s biodegradable films flap in the wind among the cover crops emerging throughout our fields. Our 50-acre farm, just like the farms with thousands of acres in Florida, California, and around the world, functions within a system that works for the moment but that is contributing, season by season, year by year, to a future where the piles of plastics gathered throughout the world become altogether unmanageable.

How the world wastes hundreds of billions of meals in a year, in three charts

The UN reports that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year worldwide. | Mykola Miakshykov/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images Think twice before throwing out your leftovers A billion meals are wasted every single day, according to a recent report from the United Nations. And that’s a conservative estimate. It’s not just food down the drain, but money, too. The 2024 UN Food Waste Index report — which measured food waste at the consumer and retail level across more than 100 countries — found that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year, from households to grocery stores to farms, all across the globe. Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Food waste alone is responsible for an estimated 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report. To put that into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be third in emissions produced, behind only the United States and China. Perhaps the most immediate harm, though, is the more than 780 million people who went hungry around the world in 2022, even as hundreds of billions of meals were wasted that same year. The world has become more efficient at producing a lot of food, so much so that there’s more than enough to go around for everyone. But in 2022, nearly 30 percent of people were moderately or severely food insecure, defined by the Food and Agricultural Organization as lacking regular access to safe and nutritious food. Food waste reduction is “an opportunity to reduce costs and to tackle some of the biggest environmental and social issues of our time: fighting climate change and addressing food insecurity,” the authors of the report write. Food waste might seem like an easy problem to solve — just stop wasting food. But in order to snuff food waste out, individuals, businesses, and policymakers alike will need to make some serious changes — and those changes will look different for each country. Global food waste is not just a consumer-level problem, but also a nasty side effect of inefficient food systems that have environmental and social implications. The UN has the goal of slashing food waste in half by 2030. For that to happen, the authors of the Food Waste Index say there’s one crucial step all countries need to do: data collection. You can’t stop wasting food until you know how much food you’re wasting. How do you measure food waste? According to the report — which was spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and co-authored by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a UK-based climate organization — households contributed to 60 percent of all food waste generated globally in 2022, compared to nearly 28 percent for food service and a little under 13 percent for retailers. However, it’s important to note that there was a lot more usable data for food waste in households than there was for food service or retail — and that’s especially true for low-income and middle-income countries. The report uses a three-level methodology with each level increasing in accuracy and utility. The first level is an estimate using preexisting food waste data from countries. For countries that haven’t yet started collecting data on food waste, UNEP took data from other nearby countries that had similar income levels and then extrapolated that information to create estimates. These figures are a helpful start to understanding the scale at which food waste may exist in a country, but the report emphasizes that most of the Level 1 estimates are not accurate enough to use beyond that. To clarify which estimates can be used for understanding the scale of a problem and which can be used beyond that, the report also assigned a “confidence” rating to each Level 1 estimate — high, medium, low, very low, or no rating. Only 11 countries were assigned a high confidence rating for household food waste estimates. Of these, Saudi Arabia had the highest amount of household food waste per person annually, at a little over 231 pounds per person. Bhutan had the lowest, at just under 42 pounds per person. The next two levels of the methodology lay out a framework in which countries can track their food waste generation. Level 2 is the recommended, baseline approach for countries and requires an actual measurement, rather than just an estimate, of food waste that is suitable for tracking food waste at a national level. Level 3 goes beyond that and gives guidances for how countries can include additional helpful data, like where wasted food goes, how much of food waste is edible, and food loss from manufacturing. While some organizations and institutions define food waste as edible food mass, the report includes both the edible and inedible parts of food. That may make it seem as if the estimations are inflated, but what’s considered edible and inedible can differ from culture to culture — think peels of fruits, or certain parts of animal meat. They also acknowledge that it’s difficult to measure edible food waste without also measuring the inedible parts, and most countries haven’t done so. Notably, the report only includes what gets thrown out at the household, retail, and food service level. That means that the Food Waste Index does not measure “food loss,” which is what gets lost in the production part of the process at farms and factories, as well as in transportation. According to the FAO, an estimated 13 percent of the world’s food is lost in the supply chain prior to hitting shelves. Why does food get wasted? The report also found that on average, household food waste in high-income, upper-middle income, and lower-income countries didn’t differ too much, but the reasons why waste happens will differ across these groups. Variables like access to electricity and refrigeration, dietary habits and behaviors, food distribution infrastructure, country temperature and so forth can all contribute to a country’s food waste levels. While there didn’t seem to be a relationship between a country’s income grouping and household food waste levels, a household’s income within that country — along with other factors — could play a part in their food waste habits. “Just as we expect the reasons for waste to vary between countries, we expect it to vary between households within the same country,” said Hamish Forbes, a senior analyst at WRAP and one of the authors of the 2024 Food Waste Index, via email. “Factors such as kitchen infrastructure, cooking skills/knowledge, cultural norms, time availability, disposable income and so on are all likely to play a role.” In the United States, the Food Waste Index found that food waste is happening mostly at the household and food service level. If we want to get those numbers down, it’s going to take every participant in our food system — from consumers all the way to big businesses and retailers. How can we stop wasting food? It would be reductive to leave the burden of solving food waste and loss to everyday people, when the problem requires solutions across industries, food sectors, governance, and consumers. “The problem is everywhere and requires solutions everywhere,” the report authors write. As of 2022, only 21 countries had made commitments to reducing food waste or food loss as a part of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the goals to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change as a part of the Paris Agreement. But out of those 21, only two countries had submitted NDCs to tackle both food waste and food loss, according to a report by WRAP. Those two countries were Jordan and Namibia, according to Forbes. Commitments are a great first step, but what comes next? “There’s a well-known saying that ‘what gets measured gets managed’ and this is very evident in the food loss and waste space,” said Forbes. He added that measurement can show the true scale of our food wastage across different sectors, and in turn, it can also help policymakers identify solutions and where to implement them. “Beyond just measuring the total amount of food waste, measurements in countries, cities or even businesses can identify ‘hotspots’,” Forbes told me. “For example, if I measure food waste in my restaurant and see from that data that most diners are leaving some of their potato fries, then I’m probably serving too much and I can reduce that wastage.” One country that’s made progress is the United Kingdom. In 2005, the UK established the Courtauld Commitment, a series of voluntary agreements between the governments, organizations, and businesses within the UK to reduce food waste and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as improve water management. The food waste reduction policies from these agreements work on all parts of the food system: supporting waste management on farms, giving guidance to food service and retail sectors on food redistribution, implementing consumer campaigns, and more. As a result, the UK has reduced per capita food waste by 23 percent in total from 2007 to 2018. Dana Gunders, the executive director of the US-based food waste reduction nonprofit ReFED, told me that in the US, there are a few ways our government can change the consumer environment so that people waste less food. One solution is passing the Food Date Labeling Act. You’ve probably found yourself squinting at a carton of eggs that’s been in your fridge for an unknown amount of time, scouring for the “sell by,” “use by,” or “best by” date and debating how safe it is to consume. As of now, the US doesn’t have a standardized labeling process for food, which has translated into consumer confusion around food quality that leads to throwing out meals that are perfectly safe to eat. Creating a standardized label system with clearer phrasing could help consumers make better choices around food usage. Then there’s Gunder’s big legislative wish: a ban on sending food to landfills, a policy that’s in the jurisdiction of states. According to ReFED, some states and municipalities have enacted policies around limiting, diverting, or banning organic material like food from entering landfills. Gunders also wants to see food service sectors and retailers like grocery stores track their food waste — again, better collection of data helps craft better solutions. She also thinks grocery stores could improve their food donation system. There are some up-and-coming intermediaries, like Too Good To Go, which connects donations from grocery stores and restaurants with consumers. But having a more robust policy that isn’t opt-in can help redistribute perfectly edible food and make sure it doesn’t go to waste. “All companies should have a solid donation policy that is across all of their locations, across all product types,” Gunders said. “Sometimes you have grocers who are great at donating bread, but they really don’t donate milk or dairy or meat or seafood. And so there are ways to do that, and some of the grocers who are best at donating are doing that.” Of course, consumers themselves play a role. Planning meals and being more careful around purchasing food, preserving food in freezers, finding ways to take leftover ingredients and making them into a meal — all are ways individuals can personally reduce their food waste. As for food waste and hunger, the report states that “reducing food waste can increase food availability for those who need it.” Forbes told me that how food loss and waste relates to hunger will depend on the sector we’re focusing on. It’ll take a lot more than simply slashing food waste to fix hunger — which is ultimately a symptom of poverty — but reducing food waste by diverting perfectly edible foods to those who need it can certainly help.

A global study just revealed the world’s biggest known plastic polluters

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo came in at the top of a global audit of plastic waste.

Every year, companies produce more than 400 million metric tons of plastic. Some of that plastic spills onto waterways or beaches, clogging streams or floating in huge gyres in the ocean. Some of it breaks down into tiny microplastics or nanoplastics that float in the air and enter human lungs, blood and organs.Sometimes it’s hard to know which companies are behind all this plastic — but now, scientists have identified some of the largest contributors.A new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances has pinpointed some of the major brands responsible for plastic pollution across six continents. The researchers, who used a team of over 100,000 volunteers to catalogue over 1.8 million pieces of plastic waste, found that 56 companies were responsible for more than 50 percent of branded plastic waste globally.The largest contributor was Coca-Cola, which accounted for 11 percent of the branded plastic pollution worldwide.The findings, researchers say, reveal the enormity of the planet’s plastic pollution problem. “This is a herculean effort we have to do,” said Win Cowger, a research director at the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research and the lead author of the study. “There are no easy fixes.”To get the data, thousands of volunteers around the world conducted plastic “audits,” in which they scoured beaches, parks, rivers and other locations for plastic waste. Volunteers examined each piece of waste and recorded any visible brands or trademarks. The group Break Free From Plastic organized 1,576 audit collections between 2018 and 2022.Out of more than 1.8 million pieces of plastic surveyed, close to 910,000 had visible brands. (Plastics can lose their brand markers through exposure to sunlight and weather.) And of those hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic, the top companies responsible were Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Danone.In an email, a spokesperson for the Coca-Cola Company pointed to the company’s World Without Waste strategy, noting that it aims “to make 100% of our packaging recyclable globally by 2025 and to use at least 50% recycled material in our packaging by 2030. ... We know more must be done and we can’t achieve our goals alone.”Nestlé said in an email that the company aims to reduce its use of new plastic by one-third and incorporate more recycled content into its packaging.PepsiCo declined to comment, and Danone did not respond to a request. The researchers also found that there was a direct relationship between a company’s production of plastic and the amount of branded plastic waste found in the environment. If a company such as PepsiCo produced 1 percent of the world’s plastic mass, for example, that company was responsible for roughly 1 percent of the waste found in the audit. If a company produced 0.1 percent of the world’s plastic mass, it was responsible for 0.1 percent of the waste.To the researchers, that finding means that recycling and waste management alone isn’t enough to manage the plastic problem.“Many of these companies actually do have programs in place to recover their waste from the environment or prevent it from ending up there,” said Neil Tangri, science and policy director for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives and another author of the study. “And what we’re seeing is that those are not really effective.”“It’s kind of my worst nightmare,” said Cowger. “It means that to solve the plastic pollution problem, we have to change in a huge way how we operate as a society.”Global leaders and negotiators are gathering in Ottawa this week to hammer out a global plastics treaty. Many environmental groups and countries are looking for an agreement that will include cutting the amount of plastic production, a goal that U.S. negotiators have resisted.Industry groups and companies say that “circular plastics,” advanced recycling and waste management can solve the problem without production limits.“Our members are investing billions of dollars in infrastructure to scale-up the supply of circular plastics, so that used plastics are prevented from entering the environment as waste, landfill or via incineration, and instead become new plastics,” Benny Mermans, chair of the World Plastics Council, said in a statement in the lead-up to the talks.Plastic industry groups have also argued that plastics help boost the global economy. According to a study commissioned by an industry group, limits on production would disproportionately affect low-income people.Researchers say that things such as advanced recycling and a circular economy may have a place in the future, but so does actually slowing the pace at which plastic is made.“We know what works: make less plastic and use less plastic,” Tangri said.Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, have helped to buoy the fossil fuel industry even as climate policies take aim at the production of oil and gas. Plastic is projected to account for half of growth in oil demand by mid-century, according to the International Energy Agency.At the same time, scientists are rushing to understand the consequences of the tiny pieces of plastic that can enter the body and organs. While microplastics have been found in many systems of the body, their effects on human health are still unclear.Scientists say that without curbs on production, plastics will continue to accumulate in the environment — and in human bodies.“It’s been status quo for a long time,” Cowger said. “And it’s obviously not working.”