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

Goodbye to PVC?

The word “vinyl” might sound innocuous, bringing to mind everyday items like LP records, flooring, pipes, or shiny plastic pants. The plastic this name refers to — polyvinyl chloride (PVC) — is the world’s third-most widely produced synthetic polymer, with more than 50 million tons cranked out each year for everything from window frames to food wrap, fake leather car seats to medical products. It’s everywhere.

But environmentalists and NGOs have been raising alarms about PVC for decades. Scientists have established that its precursor chemical is carcinogenic; that some of the additives used to make it flexible can muck with hormones; and that it can spew noxious compounds, especially when burned. It’s “the worst of the worst” when it comes to plastics, says Judith Enck, a policy expert with Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit based at Bennington College in Vermont. Now, vinyl’s heyday may finally be drawing to an end.

Read my story in Yale Environment 360

https://e360.yale.edu/features/pvc-plastic-un-treaty

The electric car battery revolution

Most EVs today are powered by lithium ion batteries, the current king of battery tech. But other batteries are now inching into the market for electric cars. We now have sodium ion batteries, offering cheap prices on some Chinese cars this year. And solid state batteries could be in cars within perhaps 5 years, letting cars go further on a single charge. 

Look even further ahead and we might have lithium air batteries, which can really pack power in, running planes and air taxis.

Read all about it in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00325-z

 

Trying to end plastic pollution

UN delegates are trying to bash out a Plastics Treaty with the ambitious goal of ending plastic pollution. They met last week in Nairobi to mark the half-way point towards the treaty, which is supposed to be written and signed in 2024. But progress was frustratingly slow. People at the meeting said a few nations with fossil fuel interests were blocking progress, slowing things down and making the draft treaty just get longer instead of shorter. Sigh.

Here's my story for Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03579-1

The scale of the problem has become epic. There is SO MUCH PLASTIC in our lives. I find it hard to imagine a world without plastic wrappers and packaging but that's where we're now trying to go... 

In my view, hopefully the treaty will:

- set a legally-binding cap for how much virgin plastic the planet is allowed to make per year. (Some people are saying cap it at 2025 levels. Others say it needs to be waaay lower: Greenpeace says it should be 75% lower than 2019 levels. We shall see)

= list out chemicals of concern (like PVC) and work to phase them out. Apparently there are around 13,000 chemicals in plastics, of which many thousands are already known to be toxic. Sigh.

- set a requirement for USE of recycled plastics in new material (because the problem isn't how much plastic we collect to recycle, but what happens to it after it's recycled. Right now there just isn't much demand for it, because virgin plastic is cheap)

and more...

Some UN treaties are really specific about what things need to happen (like the Montreal Protocol, which killed off ozone-depleting substances). Others are pretty vague (like the Paris Agreement, which tells countries to set their own targets for greenhouse gas reductions). Scientists are hoping the Plastics Treaty (whatever it gets called in the end) will be ambitious, specific, legally binding... Fingers crossed!