Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Q&A: Plastic pollution

Imogen Napper is a high-profile plastics investigator: her research prompted the ban on microbeads of plastic in beauty products, and has spurred a new rule requiring a plastics filter in washing machines in France. Read all about her very cool work here, https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/imogen-napper-interview-global-treaty-plastic-pollution

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Direct Air Capture Ramps Up

The notion of sucking carbon dioxide straight out of the air and tucking it away is seriously ramping up, with a 1 megatonne project underway in Texas (125 times bigger than the current largest effort in Iceland). 

Read all about it in Yale Environment 360 https://e360.yale.edu/features/direct-air-capture

Nuclear's role in a net zero world

 My story for Knowable 

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/nuclears-role-in-a-net-zero-world

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Google selfie

Journalist friends: Is there a term for when you go to research something, and the internet sends you back to an article you yourself wrote to find the answer? 

I just went to find out whatever happened to fuel cells, and was directed to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BC_hydrogen_highway , which leans on only 2 references, one of them written by me. Ha!

Out of curiosity, I asked wikipedia how many times "Jones, Nicola" comes up in citations. Turns out I'm cited in articles spanning from limnic eruptions to seaweed, non-fungible tokens, quantum computing, carbon-14,  "climate change and gender" and more.

How about a 'Google selfie'?

 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Nasty plastic

 

I have been reporting a lot about plastics this year, with the upcoming UN treaty against plastic pollution in the works and due to be completed by the end of 2024. I have been quite shocked by what I've been told.

One major issue is all the chemicals used in plastics -- both the monomer ingredients, and also additives like plasticizers or colourants, along with unintentionally added chemicals. There are a tonne of these. Some PVC products are known to be up to 70% phthalates by weight (a plasticizer that makes the PVC more flexible, many of which are endocrine disruptors that muck with reproductive systems and hormones). A lot of scientists I have spoken with are seriously concerned about all this: they opt for no plastic in their grandchildren's toys, avoid plastic water bottles and definitely don't ever microwave food in plastic containers. 

In all my stories I have been scrambling to find a solid reference or report on plastic chemicals that I can refer to for definitive information and numbers. Now, finally, here it is! These researchers have done a quite epic job pulling together data on 16,000 chemicals. They find 4,200 are concerning, and 3,600 of these are not currently regulated at the global level. Bring on the plastic treaty to do so!

There are provisos. On the plus side, not all plastics leach concerning chemicals. Different nations have different regulations, and some, especially in Europe, have some good protections in place. Some chemicals wound up on the "concern" list just because they're mobile (they move around a lot and can escape the plastic easily) but aren't necessarily toxic. Some of the chemicals on this list might not be in plastics at all anymore.

But on the down side, they found hundreds of concerning chemicals across all the major plastic types (not just PVC, but PET too for example). And there's so much missing data that the numbers might be higher; there might be a lot MORE toxic chemicals amongst the 16,000. That seems quite likely, actually: lots of known-to-be-bad chemicals have been replaced with different chemicals, which later turned out to also be bad. Many of the new ones on the list may be not-yet-proven bad.

Many people have a simple solution in mind: instead of a list of baddies, let's have a list of good chemicals (sustainable, non toxic, biodegradable) that we CAN use in plastics. After all, we don't need hundreds or thousands of different flame retardants. Simplifying and standardizing plastic could help a lot with toxic exposure, and with recycling too.

 My story for Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00805-2

Thursday, February 29, 2024

How bad is this year's ski season?

It has been a dire year for snow on our local Whistler-Blackcomb mountain. But plenty of people are remembering equally-bad or worse years (here's a photo from the 1980s in February, showing bare slopes). I went looking for stats... I found a few, though it's hard to draw firm conclusions. Posting them here just for fun.

 May be a black-and-white image of 3 people and text that says 'Whistler Museum 3h e Skiers come off Whistler Mountain on the Village Chair on February 28, 1981. As you can see, skiers had to download from mid -mountain as the ski out was bare. Photo: Whistler Question Collection, 1981'

 

It's hard to find anything consistently going back to the 80s and I'm wary of mixing-and-matching datasets. But here's one interesting set showing that February is typically slimmer than March.

https://www.whistler.com/weather/history/ 


 

 

https://blogs.ubc.ca/michaelpidwirny/winters-201415-vs-201516/

 

Source: https://whistler.weatherstats.ca/metrics/snow.html