Zero-tolerance vs litterbugs in Boracay

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) will adopt a zero-tolerance policy against litterbugs in Boracay after trash was found on the beaches during the first day of the dry run of the island’s reopening, an official said yesterday.

Photos of discarded trash along Boracay’s famous White Beach went viral on social media hours after the island was reopened to local tourists for a test run ahead of its scheduled reopening on Oct. 26.

DENR Undersecretary for solid waste management and local government unit Benny Antiporda said they would strictly enforce the guidelines against littering on the island.


Antiporda said they held a dialogue with the Compliant Association of Boracay (CAB) whose members include owners of hotels, resorts, retail shops and restaurants.

He said the DENR and other government agencies in charge of Boracay’s rehabilitation support the CAB’s proposal to designate its pollution officers as marshals to go after litterbugs.

He asked CAB members to use social media to remind Boracay visitors to dispose of their trash properly.

The DENR also recommended citizen’s arrest against litterbugs, Antiporda said.

The CAB earlier asked Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu to deputize its members as Boracay marshals to police public areas on the island.

As marshals, the CAB said their pollution officers would be on the lookout for litterbugs.

The DENR said littering is a criminal offense and violators may face a fine or be made to render community service from eight to 16 hours.

Under Republic Act 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000, establishments are required to designate a pollution control officer who would ensure compliance with the law, among others.

source: philstar.com

Science Says: Amount of straws, plastic pollution is huge

WASHINGTON  — Cities and nations are looking at banning plastic straws and stirrers in hopes of addressing the world's plastic pollution problem. The problem is so large, though, that scientists say that's not nearly enough.

Australian scientists Denise Hardesty and Chris Wilcox estimate, using trash collected on U.S. coastlines during cleanups over five years, that there are nearly 7.5 million plastic straws lying around America's shorelines. They figure that means 437 million to 8.3 billion plastic straws are on the entire world's coastlines.

But that huge number suddenly seems small when you look at all the plastic trash bobbing around oceans. University of Georgia environmental engineering professor Jenna Jambeck calculates that nearly 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) end up in the world's oceans and coastlines each year, as of 2010, according to her 2015 study in the journal Science .

That's just in and near oceans. Each year more than 35 million tons (31.9 million metric tons) of plastic pollution are produced around Earth and about a quarter of that ends up around the water.

"For every pound of tuna we're taking out of the ocean, we're putting two pounds of plastic in the ocean," says ocean scientist Sherry Lippiatt, California regional coordinator for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's marine debris program.

Seabirds can ingest as much as 8 percent of their body weight in plastic, which for humans "is equivalent to the average woman having the weight of two babies in her stomach," says Hardesty of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Organizers of Earth Day, which is Sunday, have proclaimed ending plastics pollution this year's theme. And following in the footsteps of several U.S. cities such as Seattle and Miami Beach, British Prime Minister Theresa May in April called on the nations of the British commonwealth to consider banning plastic straws, coffee stirrers and plastic swabs with cotton on the end.

McDonald's will test paper straws in some U.K. locations next month and keep all straws behind the counter, so customers have to ask for them. "Together with our customers we can do our bit for the environment and use fewer straws," says Paul Pomroy, who runs the fast-food company's U.K. business.

The issue of straws and marine animals got more heated after a 2015 viral video showing rescuers removing a straw from a sea turtle's nose in graphic and bloody detail.

But a ban may be a bit of a straw man in the discussions about plastics pollution. Straws make up about 4 percent of the plastic trash by piece, but far less by weight.

Straws on average weigh so little — about one sixty-seventh of an ounce or .42 grams — that all those billions of straws add up to only about 2,000 tons of the nearly 9 million tons of plastic waste that yearly hits the waters.

"Bans can play a role," says oceanographer Kara Lavendar Law, a co-author with Jambeck of the 2015 Science study. "We are not going to solve the problem by banning straws."

Scientists say that unless you are disabled or a small child, plastic straws are generally unnecessary and a ban is start and good symbol. These items that people use for a few minutes but "are sticking round for our lifetime and longer," Lippiatt says.

Marcus Eriksen, an environmental scientist who co-founded the advocacy group 5 Gyres, says working on bans of straws and plastic bags would bring noticeable change. He calls plastic bags, cups and straws that break down in smaller but still harmful pieces the "smog of microplastics."

"Our cities are horizontal smokestacks pumping out this smog into the seas," Eriksen says. "One goal for advocacy organizations is to make that single-use culture taboo, the same way smoking in public is taboo."

Steve Russell, vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council, said people can reduce waste by not taking straws, but "in many cases these plastics provide sanitary conditions for food, beverages and personal care."

The key to solving marine litter, Russell says, is "in investing in systems to capture land-based waste and investing in infrastructure to convert used plastics into valuable products."

Even though Jambeck spends her life measuring and working on the growing problem of waste pollution, she's optimistic.

"We can do this," Jambeck says. "I have faith in humans."

___

AP Retail Writer Joseph Pisani contributed from New York.

source: philstar.com

Coke plant in India ordered closed for extracting too much groundwater

LUCKNOW - Authorities in northern India have ordered the closure of a Coca-Cola bottling plant at the center of protests that it is extracting too much groundwater, an official said Wednesday.

An anti-pollution official said the Mehdiganj plant in Varanasi in the state of Uttar Pradesh had breached the conditions of its operating licence, prompting the order closure earlier this month.

"The plant is closed following our orders," Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board member secretary J.S. Yadav told AFP.

"They have also been asked to take suitable measures to recharge the depleting groundwater level by twice the amount they have extracted.

"Also, the effluents released by the plant contain pollutants beyond the permissible limits."

The company has appealed the closure order to India's environment court, the National Green Tribunal, saying the allegations were false.

Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Private Limited, a unit of Coca-Cola, said the plant has been in operation for 15 years "complying with all regulatory approvals and applicable laws."

The unit said in a statement that it was confident the courts would find that it has acted in the "best interests of the communities we serve."

The company hit a hurdle earlier this year when local authorities said they would demolish the Varanasi plant, claiming it was built on village council land and was "illegal."

The authorities also imposed a 126,000 rupee ($2,000) fine on the company over the land issue.

India is one of Coke's fastest-growing markets thanks to an expanding middle class.

The bottling plant, one of 58 that Atlanta-based Coca-Cola has in India, has been at the center of protests for years.

Demonstrators accuse the company of creating major water shortages through excessive extraction of water and of polluting groundwater and soil.

Coke, the world's largest soft drinks maker, last year announced the completion of work to expand the Varanasi bottling facility which can produce 600 polyethylene terephthalate bottles a minute.

Protests have been held against Coke's bottling plants in other parts of the country, alleging depletion of groundwater and pollution.

Activists welcomed the Varanasi plant's closure, claiming the company has a dismal environmental record.

"Coca-Cola's thirst for profits in India has placed its business interests over the well-being of communities and the environment and this is not acceptable," said Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center, an activist group.

source: interaksyon.com

Air pollution boosts lung, heart risks - studies

PARIS - Long-term exposure to particulate air pollution boosts the risk of lung cancer, even at concentrations below the legal maximum, said a European study published on Wednesday.

A separate report said short-term surge in these particles or other gas pollutants in the air also increases the risk of heart failure.

European epidemiologists said they had found an unmistakeable link between lung cancer and localized air pollution by particulate matter.

The evidence comes from 17 high-quality investigations carried out among 312,000 people in nine European countries, according to the paper in The Lancet Oncology.

These earlier studies, which had already been published, were based on reliable records of the health and lifestyle of 2,095 people who died from lung cancer during an average 13-year monitoring period.

The team sourced environmental data around the individuals' home addresses, then calculated their exposure to levels of particulate matter -- the gritty residual pollution from fossil-fuel-burning power stations, cars, and factories.

Particulate matter falls into two categories: PM2.5, meaning particles measuring no more than 2.5 micrometers, 30 times smaller than a human hair, and the slightly coarser variant, PM10.

Current EU air quality standards limit PM10 exposure to a yearly average of 40 micrograms per cubic meter, and PM2.5 exposure to 25 micrograms per cubic meter per year.

The UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) has guidelines recommending that annual exposure be limited to 20 micrograms per cubic meter for PM10 and 10 micrograms per cubic meter for PM2.5.

Unexpectedly, the new study found a cancer risk at every level, and confirmed that the higher the level, the greater the risk.

The results took account of smoking, dietm and occupation -- which can skew the risk picture.

"We found no threshold below which there was no risk," said Ole Raaschou-Nielsen from the Danish Cancer Society Research Centre in Copenhagen.

"The more the worse, the less the better."

Every increase of five micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5 drove the risk of lung cancer up by 18 percent.

And every increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM10 boosted risk by 22 percent, including for adenocarcinoma, a type of lung cancer associated with non-smokers.

In an independent comment, Jon Ayres, a professor of environmental and respiratory medicine at the Institute of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in Birmingham, central England, praised the design and scope of the study.

"There is now no doubt that fine particles are a cause of lung cancer," he told the Science Media Centre in London.

In a separate study in The Lancet, scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland carried out a meta-analysis of 35 studies in 12 countries.

It looked at PM2.5, PM10, and four air pollutants: carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone.

They found that even a brief spike in exposure -- the kind that happens when a city calls a smog alert -- caused the risk of hospitalisation or death from heart failure to rise by two or three percentage points. The only exception was ozone, a well-known respiratory irritant at the ground level.

Modelling the situation for the United States, the study suggests that if the average PM2.5 were reduced by 3.9 micrograms per cubic meter, nearly 8,000 heart-failure hospitalizations would be averted each year and the country would save a third of a billion dollars annually.

source: interaksyon.com

US study links pollution to autism risk

WASHINGTON DC - Pregnant women who were exposed to high levels of air pollution were twice as likely to have a child with autism as women who lived in low pollution areas, a US study said on Tuesday.

According to experts at Harvard University, the research is the first large national study to examine links between the prevalence of pollution and the development of the developmental disorder.

The findings are published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

"Our findings raise concerns," said lead author Andrea Roberts, a research associate in the Harvard School of Public Health Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

"Depending on the pollutant, 20 percent to 60 percent of the women in our study lived in areas where risk of autism was elevated," she said.

The data came from a large survey of 116,430 nurses that began in 1989.

For the analysis, researchers isolated 325 women who had a child with autism and 22,000 women who had a child without the disorder.

To estimate exposure to pollutants while pregnant, they used air pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency, and adjusted for factors like income, education, and smoking during pregnancy.

The analysis found that women who lived in locations with the highest levels of diesel particulates or mercury in the air were twice as likely to have a child with autism as those who lived in the areas with the lowest levels.

When the pollutants included lead, manganese, methylene chloride, and combined metal exposure, women in areas with the highest levels of these pollutants were about 50 percent more likely to have a child with autism.

Autism is a brain disorder that affects as many as one in 88 in the United States, and about one in 100 in Britain.

Researchers said the findings suggest that metals and other pollutants should be regularly measured in the blood of pregnant women to give a better understanding of whether certain pollutants increase autism risk.

source: interaksyon.com