Week 3: From Green Labels to Nanoplastics, a Global Anthem for Change

Dear all,

Bridges and Bells. A pair of doves playing on the pavement. Voices in the wind. Time. Handcuffed space. Water in the palm of the hand. Transcending meteorites. Frequency the world is operating on, being broken down into vertical symphonies, beats, sounds, blips. Noise. Yet, from time to time, new music gets produced, nevertheless the biggest question remains related to who is authoring the beats. Faith. Yes. Faith. Do you have faith?

This year’s survey by WEF, released on Sunday, was pretty depressing overall; public faith in western government, media, and business institutions is low, with Britain displaying a particularly sharp decline. Even non-governmental organizations are in trouble: only 54 percent of people say they trust NGOs to tell the truth about new innovations. And here is another interesting point to consider: if you look at a survey that the WEF itself does each year of 1,500 of its members about future risks, climate change issues are now more dominant than ever.

In the short term (i.e., the next two years), environmental risks sit alongside misinformation, geopolitical conflict, and cyber threats as the topics that worry WEF delegates. However, in the longer term (i.e., the next 10 years), environmental themes take the top five places in the list of issues that are keeping WEF delegates awake at night.

Liberal democracies and elites operating frequencies they run on, should be radically worried since, masses, obviously have less and less to believe in.

Listen to the lyrics….

The EU Parliament has given its final green light to a directive that will improve product labelling and ban the use of misleading environmental claims. The directive, adopted last week with 593 votes in favour, 21 against, and 14 abstentions, seeks to protect consumers from misleading marketing practices and help them make better purchasing choices.

To achieve this, several problematic marketing habits related to greenwashing and the early obsolescence of goods will be added to the EU list of banned commercial practices. Most importantly, the new rules aim to make product labelling clearer and more trustworthy by banning the use of general environmental claims like “environmentally friendly,” “natural,” “biodegradable,” “climate neutral,” or “eco” without proof.

The use of sustainability labels will also now be regulated, given the confusion caused by their proliferation and failure to use comparative data. In the future, only sustainability labels based on official certification schemes or established by public authorities will be allowed in the EU. Additionally, the directive will ban claims that a product has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment because of emissions offsetting schemes.

Another important objective of the new law is making producers and consumers focus more on the durability of goods. In the future, guarantee information must be more visible, and a new, harmonized label will be created to give more prominence to goods with an extended guarantee period.

The new rules will additionally prohibit baseless assertions regarding the longevity of products (such as falsely stating that a washing machine will endure 5,000 washing cycles under typical conditions), suggestions to prematurely replace consumables before their essential lifespan (frequently observed with items like printer ink), and the promotion of items as repairable when, in reality, they lack such capabilities.

The directive now also needs to receive final approval from the Council, after which it will be published in the Official Journal, and member states will have 24 months to transpose it into national law.

In addition, The European Union’s executive arm is set to recommend a 90 percent net reduction of greenhouse gases by 2040, a target backed by climate scientists and criticized by the industry in the face of high energy prices and growing international rivalry in clean technologies. The European Commission plans to endorse the goal in line with advice from its board of scientists for climate that it’s the best pathway to meet the Green Deal’s overarching aim of zeroing-out pollution by the middle of the century, according to people with knowledge of the issue.

The blueprint for the next decade is set to be adopted on Feb. 6, marking the first stage of a debate with member states on how to design future policies and objectives. The planned target for the 27-nation bloc, which is legally bound to reduce greenhouse gases by 55 percent this decade, will affect every corner of the economy and would entail significant political risk by requiring greener consumer lifestyles and more restrictions on businesses and agriculture.

A key new component of the 2040 goal will be carbon removals, including technologies such as direct air capture or carbon sequestration by farmers and foresters. The EU has signalled that this element could account for around 10 percent of the target and is yet to decide how large the share of removals will be under the blueprint. Europe wants to be a global leader in the green shift, an increasingly challenging objective when coming up against US President Joe Biden’s landmark climate package and competition from China in low-carbon technologies and critical materials.

The bloc is still grappling with the effects of an energy crisis triggered by a cut in natural gas supplies from Russia following the war in Ukraine. While benchmark power prices in Germany, the region’s biggest economy, have eased from the highs seen in 2022, they are still more than twice the levels seen before the war.

The options analysed by the commission for its climate roadmap to 2040 were an 80 percent cut, a reduction of 85-90 percent, and a decrease of 90-95 percent, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the document hasn’t been yet adopted. By the EU executive arm’s own assessment, current measures by its member states are lagging the group’s 2030 targets.

Drinking plastics…

The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marks the inaugural effort to examine bottled water for the existence of "nanoplastics" – plastic particles measuring less than 1 micrometer in length, or approximately one-seventieth the diameter of a human hair. The results reveal that bottled water may encompass up to 100 times more plastic particles than previously approximated, as prior studies only considered microplastics, which are fragments ranging from 1 to 5,000 micrometers.

Nanoplastics pose a heightened risk to human health compared to microplastics, given their small size that enables penetration into human cells, entry into the bloodstream, and potential impact on organs. Nanoplastics can even pass through the placenta, reaching the bodies of unborn babies. Although scientists have long suspected the existence of nanoplastics in bottled water, they lacked the technology to identify individual nanoparticles.

To surmount this obstacle, the authors of the study devised a novel microscopy technique, crafted a data-driven algorithm, and applied both to scrutinize approximately 25 liters of bottled water procured from three popular brands in the US (the specific brands were not disclosed by the researchers). Their examination unveiled between 110,000 and 370,000 minuscule plastic particles in each litre, with 90 percent of them being nanoplastics.

“This study provides a powerful tool to address the challenges in analysing nanoplastics, which holds the promise to bridge the current knowledge gap on plastic pollution at the nano level,” says Naixin Qian, the study’s lead author and a graduate student of Columbia University in chemistry.

“Previously this was just a dark area, uncharted. Toxicity studies were just guessing what’s in there,” adds Beizhan Yan, the study’s co-author and an environmental chemist at Columbia University. “This opens a window where we can look into a world that was not exposed to us before.” The researchers targeted seven common plastic types, including polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which many water bottles are made from, and polyamide, often used in filters to purify water before it’s bottled.

But they also discovered many unidentified nanoparticles in the water. If any of those are also nanoparticles, the prevalence of plastic in bottled water could be even higher. In a statement, the International Bottled Water Association said both that the study's methodology “needs to be fully reviewed by the scientific community” and that there “is no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles.”

The association did not comment on the findings of the study. The world produces more than 450 million tons of plastics each year, much of which eventually ends up in landfills. Most of the plastic does not degrade naturally but breaks down into smaller pieces over time. Tiny plastic bits are also routinely shed from plastic-containing products while they’re in use, including many synthetic fabrics.

370 million metric tons of carbon dioxide for the ocean floor….

A study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science finds that bottom trawling may release as much as 370 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. This is approximately half of the yearly emissions generated by the entire global shipping industry, as estimated by the International Energy Agency.

The carbon in question originates from ancient organic matter that has been entrenched in the ocean floor. Under natural circumstances without human disruptions, these sediments can remain undisturbed for thousands of years. However, trawling disrupts these sediments, liberating the stored carbon into the water column. Some of this material descends back to the seafloor and is compacted once again. Yet, a portion ultimately ascends to the surface as carbon dioxide—a potent greenhouse gas—that diffuses into the atmosphere.

The study indicates that around 55 to 60 percent of the CO2 released into the water column due to trawling escapes into the atmosphere. This process typically occurs within seven to nine years, demonstrating the rapid impact of trawling. The researchers emphasize that this study underscores a frequently neglected source of climate-warming emissions. They propose that regulatory authorities possess the capability to swiftly address this issue, suggesting that implementing an alternative management strategy for the location and method of fishing could yield almost immediate positive effects on climate impact, as stated by Trisha Atwood, the lead author and an aquatic ecologist at Utah State University.

Melting 1 trillion metric tons

Greenland's ice sheet is undergoing an unprecedented melt, prompting concerns about the potential collapse of crucial ocean currents and its repercussions on global sea levels, as revealed by a recent study. Over several decades, virtually every glacier in Greenland has undergone substantial ice reduction due to the impacts of global warming. Conventional measurement approaches, such as gravity data and ice sheet height assessments, have effectively captured the ice loss contributing to the ascent of sea levels.

Nevertheless, these techniques overlook the retreat of glaciers primarily situated beneath sea level in Greenland's narrow fjords. To bridge this informational void, scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory resorted to satellite images, both manually and AI-derived, to monitor the positions of Greenland's glaciers on a monthly basis from 1985 to 2022.

The analysis revealed that the ice lost in this timeframe has been underestimated by 20 percent, or about 1,000 gigatons (1 trillion metric tons), due to the overlooked retreat around Greenland’s perimeter, also known as calving. Dr. Chad Greene, the lead researcher behind the study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, stressed the magnitude of the changes observed.

“The changes around Greenland are tremendous and they’re happening everywhere – almost every glacier has retreated over the past few decades,” he said. Greene explained that the influx of freshwater from melting ice into the North Atlantic Ocean could weaken the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), a crucial system of ocean currents that acts as a conveyor belt, redistributing heat throughout the Earth’s climate system by bringing it from the tropics in the Southern Hemisphere all the way to Greenland and carrying cold water back south.

“It makes sense that if you dump freshwater on to the north Atlantic Ocean, then you certainly get a weakening of the Amoc, though I don’t have an intuition for how much weakening,” he said. While the flow has already been reduced by about 15 percent in the last five decades, a weakening of 24 percent to 39 percent is expected even before the tipping point is reached, something that could happen as early as in 2100. A study published in 2021 found that AMOC is already at its weakest in over 1,600 years, a warning sign that a crucial tipping point may be reached sooner than expected.

Carbon Bombs.…

The best estimate we have is that militaries are responsible for 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the global military were a country, this would place it fourth in terms of its emissions, between India and Russia.

Militaries are highly fossil fuel-dependent and, while net zero targets have opened up debates around military decarbonization, effective decarbonization is impossible without understanding the scale of emissions and without the domestic and international policy frameworks to encourage it.

At present, we have neither, while carbon-intensive global military spending has reached record levels. While some militaries have set vague emissions reduction goals, they are often short on scope and detail, and on accountability. For example, while NATO has drafted a methodology for counting emissions, it does not apply to its members, and it explicitly excludes emissions from NATO-led operations and missions, training, and exercises.

Amplified by the ongoing destruction of Gaza, Cop28 saw unprecedented attention on the relationship between the climate crisis, peace, and security. But while visible inside events and protests, military and conflict emissions were again absent from the formal agenda.

Closing this military and conflict emissions gap will first require that governments acknowledge the outsize role that militaries play in global emissions, and the need for greater transparency. It will require that the climate movement build on the growing trend towards intersectionality in its advocacy, and not shy away from these subjects. And it will depend on expanding the community of researchers documenting military and conflict emissions, and on their data being used by organizations tracking and reporting on global emissions trends.

That’s all for this week!

Best regards,

Sasja