Increasing plastic pollution is at a dangerous level in our oceans

From an Article by Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch & Oceans, January 22, 2021

This month, a new era began in the fight against plastic pollution.

In 2019, 187 nations within the United Nations amended the 1989 Basel Convention, which governs trade in hazardous materials, to include plastic waste. The historic treaty created a legally binding framework to make global trade in plastic waste more transparent and better regulated, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) said in a press release.

The amendment to the Basel Convention, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2021, will result in a cleaner ocean within five years and allow developing nations like Vietnam and Malaysia to refuse low-quality and difficult-to-recycle waste before it ever gets shipped, a UN transboundary waste chief told The Guardian.

“It is my optimistic view that, in five years, we will see results,” Rolph Payet, the executive director of the Basel Convention, told The Guardian. “People on the frontline are going to be telling us whether there is a decrease of plastic in the ocean. I don’t see that happening in the next two to three years, but on the horizon of five years. This amendment is just the beginning.”

“Pollution from plastic waste, acknowledged as a major environmental problem of global concern, has reached epidemic proportions with an estimated 100 million tons of plastic now found in the oceans, 80-90 percent of which comes from land-based sources,” the UNEP release noted, explaining a primary rationale behind the amendment’s passage.

Once in the oceans, plastic continues to cause harm. It degrades into microplastics, which end up in our seafood and ultimately us. A recent study also found that plastic pollution increases ocean acidification.

The amendment now requires “prior notice and consent” in writing from importing and transit countries before shipping plastic waste for recycling, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)explained. Exporting countries must detail whether a shipment is mixed or contaminated. If permission isn’t granted to receive the goods, they must remain in their country of origin.

The new international rule aims to level the playing field between wealthy nations that dump contaminated plastic waste and poorer ones that have traditionally received it. According to The Guardian, before the new rule, shipments containing contaminated, non-recyclable and low-quality plastics were often sold to developing nations for recycling. After China refused to continue accepting contaminated waste in 2018, the onus fell on other developing nations to accept it, a 2020 Greenpeace report found. Once received, the waste was often illegally burned or dumped in landfills and waterways because it was unusable and unrecyclable.

Heng Kiah Chun, a Greenpeace Malaysia campaigner, called the impact from illegally dumping plastic waste from more than 19 countries worldwide “an indelible mark” left throughout Southeast Asia, the report added.

According to the EPA, the Basel Convention made an exception for pre-sorted, clean, uncontaminated and recycling-bound plastic scrap: it will not be subject to informed consent requirements. The idea is to encourage exports of commercially viable plastics for recycling rather than the unrestricted dumping of plastic trash that previously occurred.

In Dec. 2020, the European Union passed additional regulationsthat are even stricter than the Basel Convention amendment, including a ban on sending unsorted plastic waste, which is harder to recycle, to poorer countries.

Despite leading the world in plastic waste, the U.S. did not agree to the amendment in 2019. However, the amendment still applies to the U.S. anytime it tries to trade plastic waste with another of the 187 participating countries, CNN reported.

Rather than framing the plastic problem as an issue between developed and developing nations, some critics would rather see commercial producers take responsibility. Others, noting that recycling models, especially in the U.S., aren’t working, are encouraging a cultural shift away from using plastics, stemming the problem of plastic pollution at the source.

Nevertheless, the convention is a “crucial first step towards stopping the use of developing countries as a dumping ground for the world’s plastic waste, especially those coming from rich nations,” Von Hernandez, Break Free From Plastic global coordinator, told CNN.

“Countries at the receiving end of mixed and unsorted plastic waste from foreign sources now have the right to refuse these problematic shipments, in turn compelling source countries to ensure exports of clean, recyclable plastics only,” Hernandez added. “Recycling will not be enough, however. Ultimately, production of plastics has to be significantly curtailed to effectively resolve the plastic pollution crisis.”

Meet the Press explores “climate change”

From an Article by Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch.com, Meet the Press (NBC), December 31, 2018

In an unusual move for the Sunday talk show circuit, NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd devoted its entire program Sunday to discussing climate change, and only interviewed people who acknowledge that it is a serious threat.

“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it,” Todd said, as Mother Jones reported. “The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period. We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

This is a departure for Sunday talk shows, and for Meet the Press itself, Mother Jones pointed out. When the Trump administration released volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment over Thanksgiving weekend, Todd invited Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, who both disputed the science behind climate change.

But this Sunday’s show broke with that pattern. It featured full interviews with climate leaders, including outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as a panel with experts Dr. Kate Marvel, NBC’s Anne Thompson, Craig Fugate, Michèle Flournoy and Florida Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo, the rare GOP member who pushes for climate action.

“We need to stop covering the debate and start covering the story, so that people see that this is real, and so that politicians take a more-pragmatic approach and find solutions that are actually achievable,” Curbelo said.

In both of their segments, Brown and Bloomberg, who co-chaired the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this fall, spoke of the need for the U.S. government to step up its action on climate change. President Donald Trump has denied the importance of the issue and promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Brown said he wished the president and Congress would worry more about transitioning away from fossil fuels than tariffs.

“I would point to the fact that it took Roosevelt many, many years to get America willing to go into World War II and fight the Nazis. Well, we have an enemy, though different, but perhaps, very much devastating in a similar way. And we’ve got to fight climate change. And the president’s got to lead on that,” Brown said, as NBC reported.

Bloomberg also criticized Trump’s stance. “You know, I’ve always thought Trump has a right to his opinions. But he doesn’t have a right to his own facts,” Bloomberg said.

But Bloomberg also put pressure on whoever may challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential race, saying that climate change needed to be a major campaign issue. “Any candidate for federal office better darn well have a plan to deal with the problem that the Trump science advisers say could, basically, end this world,” he said, The Guardian reported. “I can tell you one thing, I don’t know whether I’m going to run or not, but I will be out there demanding that anybody that’s running has a plan.”

The show also reported that the majority of Americans are starting to take climate change more seriously, pointing to a survey from the the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication showing that 70 percent of Americans think climate change is happening and 57 percent think it is human caused.

The polling, and the show, follow two years of extreme weather events from hurricanes to wildfires. NBC’s Anne Thompson said that more Americans were beginning to believe in climate change because, “We’re starting to live climate change in real time.”