Seeking Solutions to PFAS Pollution

Chemical Companies Are Churning Out New PFAS. Where in the World Are They Ending Up?

The Persistence of PFAS

A Peculiar Polymer Paired with Sunlight Could Remove PFAS

Tracing the Path of PFAS Across Antarctica

Pollution Is Rampant. We Might As Well Make Use of It.

This month, Eos is taking a long look at “forever chemicals.” Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been percolating through our industrial environment since the 1940s. They help make products nonstick, waterproof, and stain resistant. They also make their way into air, soil, and water, as well as our bodies, where they have been linked to impaired immune systems, developmental delays in children, and some cancers.

Since discovering that PFAS might be harmful to human and environmental health, researchers and industries have reformed the chemicals into novel substances. The behaviors of these novel PFAS are proving difficult to pin down, as Grace van Deelen explores in her feature “Chemical Companies Are Churning Out New PFAS. Where in the World Are They Ending Up?”

From the deep ocean to alpine glaciers, scientists are being forced to play “chemical Whac-A-Mole” to study novel PFAS, one scientist told van Deelen. Researchers are also searching for—and finding—PFAS in the isolated interior of the White Continent, as described in Rebecca Owen’s “Tracing the Path of PFAS Across Antarctica.”

Once PFAS have been identified, scientists work to disarm them with filtration, heat, and even sunshine. In an innovative approach, “A Peculiar Polymer Paired with Sunlight Could Remove PFAS,” writes Emily Gardner.

Another option is to put PFAS to work. Read about how scientists are using trifluoroacetic acid, a less toxic PFAS, to gain a rough idea of how recently an aquifer has been recharged in Saima May Sidik’s “Pollution Is Rampant. We Might As Well Make Use of It.”

As PFAS permeate our environment in different ways, scientists are taking the lead in developing proactive approaches to search for, study, and maybe take the “forever” out of “forever chemicals.”

—Caryl-Sue Micalizio, Editor in Chief

Citation: Micalizio, C.-S. (2026), The persistence of PFAS, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260135. Published on 30 April 2026.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Seeking Solutions to PFAS Pollution

Chemical Companies Are Churning Out New PFAS. Where in the World Are They Ending Up?

The Persistence of PFAS

A Peculiar Polymer Paired with Sunlight Could Remove PFAS

Tracing the Path of PFAS Across Antarctica

Pollution Is Rampant. We Might As Well Make Use of It.

On a rocky archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, staff at the Faroese Environment Agency and the Faroe Marine Research Institute regularly sample tissues from the North Atlantic long-finned pilot whales that roam the waters around the islands. The archive of these samples stretches back to the 1980s and has helped researchers determine the reach of human-made contaminants in the remote marine environment.

Jennifer Sun is one of those researchers. Sun studies PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as “forever chemicals”—at Harvard University and is the lead author of a recently published study that analyzed how these toxic chemicals have accumulated in pilot whale tissue over the past 2 decades.

Using samples of whale tissue collected between 2001 and 2023, Sun and her colleagues measured a parameter called bulk extractable organofluorine, which shows the overall amount of organofluorine-containing chemicals (including PFAS) in the tissue. They then used a more targeted analysis able to confirm the identity of 28 specific chemicals out of thousands of possible PFAS formulations.

The study’s results showed an expected decrease in the concentrations of older PFAS but an unexpected absence of newer PFAS chemicals. This anomaly could be indicative of an emerging question in PFAS research: Where are the newest PFAS going?

Prolific PFAS

There are two general categories of PFAS. The first includes legacy PFAS such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS). Chemical manufacturers produced these compounds in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s for products including nonstick cookware and food packaging and in industries such as fabric waterproofing, industrial manufacturing, and firefighting.

Legacy PFAS were phased out in the early 2000s, and novel PFAS were made to replace them. The term “novel” is independent of chemical properties and instead refers to when the chemicals’ production began, though novel PFAS typically have formulations meant to reduce their persistence in the environment. For example, many novel PFAS molecules have shorter chains of fluorinated carbons than their legacy counterparts.

Novel PFAS include possibly millions of different chemical structures, and their production and use are increasing globally.

In the United States and elsewhere, regulatory structures that limit PFAS production target specific chemicals, such that every new formulation by a company must be tested individually before restrictions are put in place. With companies continually conjuring new PFAS formulations—which environmental advocates often call “regrettable substitutions” for their sometimes harmful effects—understanding the fate and transport of novel PFAS is difficult and time-consuming. Research on the behavior of specific PFAS may be a drop in the bucket when millions of potential PFAS, with millions of potential behaviors, pose current and future risks to people and the environment.

Scientists like Sun are determined to untangle how the fate of these new chemicals differs from their predecessors. As Sun expected, the phaseout of legacy PFAS was reflected in the pilot whale tissue she tested. These results are good news; they clearly show that the bans on legacy PFAS are working.

“We’re still finding [older] compounds, but clearly, they are no longer as abundant in the environment as they used to be, which is a positive,” said Bridger Ruyle, an environmental engineer at New York University who studies PFAS and assisted Sun and her coauthors in deciding which methods to use for the new study.

But Sun and her colleagues also expected an overall increase in concentrations of novel PFAS—after all, production of these chemicals is higher than ever, and researchers finally had the analytical tools to catch them.

That wasn’t what they found. Instead, all but two of the emerging PFAS they tested for were virtually nowhere to be seen in the whale tissue, leaving the scientists leading the study to wonder where novel PFAS were accumulating or if instrumentation was limiting their detection.

“We do know that the novel PFAS are being produced, which means they’re going somewhere. Where they are, and how exposed people and other wildlife are, is not as clear,” Sun said.

“The inference is, if it’s not in the whales, and it’s not in the ocean…where is it?” asked Elsie Sunderland, an environmental scientist at Harvard University and coauthor of the new study.

Sun and Sunderland’s question—asking where novel PFAS are going—is one scientists are probing from multiple angles. Those who study particle transport are asking how novel PFAS might travel through Earth’s water and air. Those on the chemistry side of the investigation are deducing how novel PFAS might break down. And those who monitor environments are looking for traces of novel PFAS in various corners of Earth.

The answers to their questions have direct, practical implications for human and environmental health and could indicate whether a growing proportion of harmful PFAS may be ending up in close proximity to humans—where we work and eat and breathe.

A Toxic Legacy

The chemical properties of PFAS have made the chemicals useful since the 1940s. These same properties also make them highly persistent—the most durable types may not break down in the environment for several thousand years.

PFAS are linked to certain cancers and other human health harms. Much of the available data linking PFAS to poor health come from analyses of legacy PFOA and PFOS. They show an association between increased exposure to these chemicals and altered immune and thyroid function, liver and kidney disease, reproductive system disruptions, and more.

Chemical manufacturers phased out production of legacy PFAS after scientific evidence emerged associating PFAS and human health harms, businesses began to lose money in massive lawsuits, and regulations tightened. Novel PFAS were intended to show properties similar to legacy PFAS but were meant to break down more easily in the environment (lower persistence) and accumulate less easily in living tissue (lower bioaccumulative ability), though studies have shown mixed results about whether novel PFAS are actually safer for humans or break down more easily.

Because PFAS production data are often proprietary, scientists who study PFAS, like Sun, must rely on partial inventories of PFAS production or reverse-engineer those numbers from observations in the environment.

Without a clear list of the chemical structures of novel PFAS, scientists don’t always have the analytical standards necessary for routine detection. And once scientists do understand the behavior of a PFAS chemical, it may be quickly replaced by another, unknown alternative. “We call it chemical Whac-A-Mole,” Sunderland said.

Legacy PFAS tend to have a high affinity for water and typically end up in the ocean, the place scientists refer to as the chemicals’ “terminal sink.” Many legacy PFAS also entered the ocean through atmospheric transport such as rain or snow. But because of the sheer number of chemical formulas and the chemical differences between legacy and novel PFAS, the pathways that novel PFAS take through the environment are less clear.

Tracking the movement and accumulation of novel PFAS in the environment is crucial for understanding how these chemicals may affect ecological and human health.

Still, the science is inconclusive about whether novel PFAS are moving or accumulating differently than their legacy counterparts, whether they have a different terminal sink, and where that terminal sink may be.

Close to Home

One possible answer to the question of the missing novel PFAS may have to do with geography. The chemicals may not have reached pilot whales in the Faroes because something about the new chemistry has led them elsewhere in the environment. To Sun, evidence suggests “that a lot of these novel PFAS, which we know are being produced, may not be transporting out into this more remote environment either at all or as quickly.”

Novel PFAS might be accumulating closer to their sources—and closer to us. “It may simply be that some of the replacement PFAS don’t make it all the way out into the open ocean. But if they are still in the terrestrial environment and the near-coastal environment, then wildlife and people who live close to the sources can be exposed, said Frank Wania, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

For example, one study monitored PFAS in coastal beluga whales in Canada’s St. Lawrence Estuary, relatively close to human communities and PFAS manufacturing sources. The study showed increasing concentrations of unregulated novel PFAS in whale tissue from 2000 to 2017, while concentrations of legacy PFAS declined.

The suggestion that novel PFAS are accumulating close to human communities is supported by measurements of PFAS in human tissue, too. Studies show that a high proportion of detectable organofluorine chemicals in human tissue are increasingly unidentifiable, suggesting that some of the novel PFAS production “is in us,” Sunderland said.

Far and Away

Though there are some indications that novel PFAS may be retained closer to human communities, there are also reasons to think some novel PFAS chemistries have resulted in substances that can actually travel farther and more easily than their legacy counterparts.

Anna Kärrman, an environmental chemist at Örebro University in Sweden, said that some novel PFAS may be more easily transported in the environment: “The more novel chemistries are increasing the properties of being very mobile in water, very mobile in the atmosphere, and not necessarily very bioaccumulative.”

The mobility of novel PFAS was on full display in a 2020 study that Sunderland coauthored, in which researchers reported detecting hexafluoropropylene oxide-dimer acid, a novel PFAS chemical more commonly known as GenX, in the Arctic for the first time. GenX, produced by chemical manufacturer Chemours, was meant to replace the legacy compound PFOA. The 2020 study suggested GenX “has already moved quite a bit,” said Rainer Lohmann, a marine geochemist who leads the STEEP (Sources, Transport, Exposure and Effects of PFAS) Center at the University of Rhode Island.

The 2020 study also found higher concentrations of PFAS in the Arctic Ocean’s surface water, suggesting that the atmosphere was a particularly important transport pathway for chemical transport. This idea is supported by studies of High Arctic ice caps, which experience contamination only from atmospheric sources, and polar bear tissue. Atmospheric transport of novel PFAS is a subject “at the edge” of PFAS research, Sunderland said.

Wherever researchers look, they’re finding that atmospheric transport is an important pathway by which some PFAS, especially PFAS precursors—chemicals that break down in the environment and become PFAS (either novel or legacy)—move. One idea called the PAART (precursor atmospheric and reaction transport) theory was developed by Scott Mabury, an environmental chemist at the University of Toronto, and others. The PAART theory proposes that many of the harmful PFAS that end up in the most remote parts of Earth are the result of the breakdown of volatile precursor PFAS that have traveled in the atmosphere.

According to Lohmann, atmospheric transport means the ocean remains a terminal sink because many novel PFAS transported in rain or snow will ultimately be deposited in the ocean.

In this scenario, the question of why novel PFAS are not bioaccumulating in Faroese pilot whales remains a mystery. While Lohmann suggests the novel compounds simply don’t accumulate in living tissue, Sunderland isn’t sure that’s the whole story: “As apex predators, the whales are sentinels for what is available and being taken up from the ocean,” she wrote in an email. “Since we don’t see [novel PFAS], it seems unlikely there are large quantities of these chemicals present.”

Profuse PFAS

Another possible explanation for the surprising results of Sun’s whale study could be that there’s just a lag; that is, novel PFAS will end up in Faroe Island pilot whales someday but haven’t yet. Chemicals that could eventually end up in the ocean may be temporarily trapped in soils or recycled back into terrestrial ecosystems via sea spray aerosols, for example.

“The delay we are seeing in the ocean response may in fact be [PFAS] precursors being retained in source zones,” Sunderland wrote in an email. These chemicals may be “taking a really long time to be transformed into more mobile compounds.”

In their pilot whale study, Sun and her colleagues modeled the transport of PFAS to the subarctic and found a 10- to 20-year lag existed between the production of a legacy PFAS compound and its detection in whale tissue. We’re still within that range for many novel PFAS. Sun said she would have expected them to show up in pilot whale tissue by now if they behaved like their legacy counterparts, though it’s possible that it has taken time for the volume of novel PFAS production to ramp up, increasing the time it would take for the substances to be detected in tissues.

Still, the number of possible novel PFAS chemistries—again, there could be several million different compounds—makes it difficult to generalize how these new substances are, as a group, moving through the environment. “Because the exact structures of all [novel] PFAS remain unknown, some compounds may simply not be captured by the methods used,” Heidi Pickard, an environmental engineer at the consulting firm Ramboll and coauthor on the new whale study, wrote in an email.

Another reason novel PFAS are harder to study is that companies release lower concentrations of more kinds of the chemicals, rather than the “monstrously high” emissions of some legacy PFAS in the 1970s–1990s, noted Mabury, who was not involved in the new pilot whale study.

A New Regulatory Approach

According to Sun and Sunderland, cataloging differences between novel and legacy PFAS misses the broader point: We simply need to produce less PFAS. We’ve known for decades that PFAS harm human health, and some scientists have even argued that humans’ continual production and release of novel chemical compounds could drive Earth beyond a “safe operating space.”

Where scientists probe next may be less urgent than how policymakers decide to tackle the PFAS problem, Sunderland said: “Researchers are critical for exposing the problem. But that, to me, is not the central issue here. The central issue here is a societal issue.”

Chemical manufacturers are actively creating novel PFAS all the time. Kärrman, for example, has noticed patent applications for PFAS compounds with chemistries that “are nothing like we have seen before” that may start entering our environment in 5 or 10 years.

To Kärrman, that’s a reason for governments to push for chemical regulation based on properties such as persistence and bioaccumulation, rather than the chemical-by-chemical formula used in most countries, including the United States.

Such an approach has gotten traction in Europe via a proposal by the European Chemicals Agency to restrict the entire class of PFAS chemicals. The proposal is still under evaluation, and a final decision is expected by the end of the year.

In the United States, PFAS regulation and remediation are a key aspect of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement, according to the EPA, and the federal government and some states already limit the concentrations of individual PFAS in drinking water. However, the EPA also said it planned to weaken some of those limits last year.

“We’re in a cycle of picking these regrettable alternatives [to legacy PFAS] and then figuring out that it was regrettable decades later,” Sunderland said. “We’re never going to catch up using this chemical-by-chemical approach.”

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Chemical companies are churning out new PFAS. Where in the world are they ending up?, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260136. Published on 30 April 2026.

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The coal industry can damage human health in myriad ways via dangerous working conditions and harmful pollution. But the income opportunities offered by the industry can also provide much-needed stability for certain communities, such as those in Appalachia’s coal country.

“Being employed is good for your health, but environmental pollution is bad for your health, and these two things are operating at the same time in some communities,” said Mary Willis, an epidemiologist at Boston University.

The industry, though, is changing. Total coal production in the United States peaked in 2008, and the number of miners has steadily dropped since then.

A new study coauthored by Willis and published in Rural Sociology delves into the effects of this decline on life expectancies across the United States and in Appalachia in particular. The results show that a disappearing coal mining industry has mixed effects on health, highlighting the importance of a “just transition”—a shift away from coal mining and toward clean energy that also prioritizes decent work opportunities for those left without a job.

“How do we balance these two conflicting priorities?” Willis said.

Delving into the Decline

Coal production and consumption are linked to many human health harms, including heart disease, asthma, lung cancer, mental illness, and more. But how those health impacts intersect with the broader economic effects of mining has not been well studied.

In the new study, the research team analyzed the effects of the declining industry through the lens of the social determinants of health, or how social structures influence health outcomes.

To study these effects, the team compared coal mining data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to life expectancy data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington from 2012 to 2019. Life expectancy is a metric that can be responsive to subtle changes in the environment, Willis explained. For example, the decommissioning of a coal-fired power plant a few miles away from a community may not affect residents’ day-to-day life but probably affects the scale of life expectancy across the population.

In coal-producing counties across the United States, the average life expectancy was 1.6 years lower than that in non-coal-producing counties. But the declining coal industry had more nuanced impacts on health in Appalachian communities, the researchers found. As coal production fell and miner labor hours decreased, life expectancy increased. But as the number of jobs available decreased, life expectancy decreased, too.

The findings suggest that the employment and associated economic impacts of a waning coal industry harm health. Previous studies documented similar increases in mortality in other regions where the fossil fuel industry has declined. Such research has indicated that these increased mortality rates may be partially driven by “deaths of despair” from drug and alcohol use and suicide related to economic distress. The association of these factors with mortality rates in coal country, the authors suggest, may be an area for future study.

Understanding that coal mining is associated with some positive economic and health effects is “an important perspective for understanding the sector as a whole,” said Lucas Henneman, an environmental engineer at George Mason University who was not involved in the new study. “It’s a really interesting piece of work.”

“This is just a really complex story that hasn’t been told yet—putting health into the context of these just energy transitions,” Willis said.

The complex reality of the coal industry extends beyond Appalachia. Most of the pollution related to the coal industry consists of toxins released when coal is burned, meaning those who bear the brunt of coal’s health impacts may not be located where coal is mined, Henneman said.

In fact, a 2023 study by Henneman and others found that before 2009, a quarter of all air pollution–related deaths of people on Medicare were attributable to coal burning. From 2013 to 2020, that number dropped to 7%, alongside a drop in coal consumption. A complete picture of how the coal industry affects health should also consider how pollution travels beyond coal country—where it’s burned, how it’s transported in the air, and who ultimately breathes it in, he said.

A Just Transition

The economic activity of a mine, through direct employment as well as businesses reliant on the mine and miners, “chases away other opportunities,” making the mine the economic backbone of the area, said Jonathan Buonocore, an environmental health scientist at Boston University and a coauthor of the new study. The concept of a just transition aims to ensure that employment opportunities in the wake of the coal industry’s decline reach these communities.

“The question is how to provide [jobs] in a way that provides the same level of stability, same kind of income benefits, and isn’t too much of a shock to [communities’] way of life or sense of identity,” Buonocore said.

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), As the coal industry fades, life expectancies in coal country shift, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260134. Published on 30 April 2026.

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Source: Water Resources Research

Wildfires can increase flooding risks in and downstream of burned areas by removing vegetation and disturbing hydrologic processes. As the climate changes, the severity of both wildfires and heavy rainfall events is increasing, meaning flooding is likely to become more severe in the near future. Better understanding how, and by how much, wildfires change flood risk is important for disaster and infrastructure planning for communities around the country.

Canham and Lane used streamflow data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Information System and precipitation data from the NOAA Analysis of Record for Calibration product to identify storms and quantify their effects across seven burned watersheds in the western United States.

To make the most of the limited data on flooding in the years following wildfires, the researchers created a paired-storms framework: They identified postfire peak flows (PFPFs), defined as the five highest peak flows within 3 years of a wildfire across seven watersheds. Then, for each precipitation event causing a PFPF, they looked for storms with similar characteristics (or paired storms) that occurred before the wildfire. Storm characteristics used for pairing included the season in which the storm occurred, recent precipitation, and precipitation depth, duration, and peak intensity.

The researchers found significantly elevated peak flows after wildfires in many cases, underlining the risks to communities following wildfires and validating their approach for use elsewhere.

Altogether, the authors found 26 PFPF events, including 20 with paired storms occurring before wildfires. For 75% of the postfire storms, their peak flows were 2 or more times greater than prefire peak flows. PFPFs were most likely to happen in the first year after a wildfire and typically occurred following storms that were centered upstream of the watershed centroid, were uniform in shape, and fully covered the watershed and burned area, the authors reported. They also found some evidence that the first storm in the year immediately following a fire has a higher-than-expected chance of producing a PFPF.

Future work could look more deeply at the characteristics of storms occurring over burned areas, such as storm direction and watershed recovery, and could apply the automated methods to more burned watersheds and storm events to enhance the robustness of the work, the authors say. (Water Resources Research, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025WR040693, 2026)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), How wildfires worsen flood risk, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260133. Published on 30 April 2026.

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Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: AGU Advances

The albedo change of marine clouds is achieved by targeted additions of aerosols, and in particular, sea salt. To assess the viability of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) requires a fundamental understanding of the impact of aerosols on cloud evolution and properties, and on the cloud environment.

Doherty et al. [2026] propose a framework for studying MCB across scales. This includes small- to large-scale studies aimed at systematically characterizing the life-cycle of aerosols and the diurnal cycle of cloud processes, how these change with the magnitude, duration and type of aerosol applied, and monitoring potential harmful direct or indirect consequences of aerosol injection, such as regional changes in temperature or precipitation.

Citation: Doherty, S. J., Diamond, M. S., Wood, R., & Hirasawa, H. (2026). Defining scales of field studies and experiments to assess marine cloud brightening. AGU Advances,7, e2025AV001939. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001939

—Ana P. Barros, Editor, AGU Advances

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Out of 52 climate targets needed to reach net zero by 2050, only six are on track or have been met. The other 46 are behind, failing, or marked as Code Red. This is according to the Speed & Scale tracker, a detailed public scorecard that measures if the global economy is cutting emissions fast enough.

The tracker is part of an initiative started in 2021 by investor John Doerr, known for backing Google and Amazon early on. He used Silicon Valley’s Objectives and Key Results method to tackle the climate crisis. The 2026 edition comes with a new letter from Doerr called “Let’s Build, Friends, Build,” a call to focus on the need to build solutions. As he puts it, pledges alone won’t cool the planet—real progress comes from cutting emissions.

How the Tracker Works

Speed & Scale breaks down decarbonization into 10 main goals, such as electrifying transportation and investing in clean energy. Each goal has measurable key results with targets for 2035 and 2050. Progress is rated on a five-level scale, from Achieved to Code Red. Code Red is the worst rating and is given to areas with over 3 gigatons of yearly emissions and little or no progress.

The 2026 update now uses Climate TRACE, a satellite and AI system, instead of UN country reports to measure emissions. This change raised the baseline from 59 gigatons in 2019 to 74 gigatons in 2024. The increase is not due to a sudden jump in emissions, but because TRACE finds fossil-fuel activity that country reports often miss. Atmospheric CO₂ is now at 429 parts per million, which is about 53 percent higher than before the industrial era.

Where Cost Curves Are Winning

The key results that are on track have one thing in common: clean technology has become the cheaper choice. Electric vehicles show this best. There were about one million EVs on the road ten years ago, but now there are over 50 million. EVs make up more than 20 percent of new car sales worldwide and over half in China. In the first nine months of 2025, enough solar and wind power was built to stop the growth of fossil fuels in electricity. According to BloombergNEF, solar costs have fallen by 84 percent since 2010.

There are now three million more clean-energy jobs than fossil-fuel jobs worldwide, according tothe International Energy Agency. For the 249 Fortune Global 500 companies that report their direct emissions (Scope 1 and 2), those emissions have dropped by 23 percent since 2019. However, Scope 3 emissions, which include supply chain and product use, make up about 95 percent of their total and are not decreasing as quickly.

Code Red: Where the Cost Curve Hasn’t Bent

Methane emissions from oil and gas operations are still going up, even though the IEA says 75 percent could be cut using current technology, often at a net savings. Methane is about 80 times more powerful than CO₂ over 20 years, making it the most cost-effective way to cut emissions, yet progress is going in the wrong direction.

BuildingMost building heating and cooling still relies on fossil fuels, even as a million new buildings are added each month. Heavy industry is also behind: there are no commercial-scale zero-carbon steel plants and only one net-zero cement facility in the world. The tracker says we need 700 steel and 300 cement plants by 2035. Industrial agriculture and livestock are also rated Code Red. Carbon removal is far behind too—by 2025, just over one million metric tons have been removed, according to CDR.fyi, but the plan calls for 14 billion tons per year by 2050.

Where Each Objective Stands

The Build Imperative — and the 1.5°C Verdict

In his new letter, Doerr says the climate challenge is now shaped by three main forces: rising demand for electricity, the global politics of clean-tech manufacturing, and falling costs thanks to market forces. He writes, “We cannot cut fossil fuels without building the alternative.” The updated tracker shows this change. While the 2021 plan focused on percentage reductions, the 2026 version spells out what needs to be built: 600 million EVs, 700 zero-carbon steel mills, and 30,000 TWh of solar and wind power.

Doerr also shares the toughest update: Speed & Scale now says keeping global warming to 1.5°C is no longer possible. Five more years of rising emissions have used up the remaining carbon budget. The new goal is to stay below 2°C, with the U.S., EU, and China aiming for net zero by 2050.

The post The World Has a Decarbonization Scoreboard. Here’s What It Says. appeared first on Earth911.

The bag your potato chips come in is seven layers deep. Metalized polyester, a plastic coated with a thin layer of metal, keeps out light. Polyethylene, a common plastic, holds the seal. A printed film provides the label. An oxygen barrier, a layer that blocks oxygen, helps prevent spoilage. There’s another sealant (a layer that helps bond the package), another structural layer for strength, and a food-contact inner skin that directly touches the chips. Each of those layers solves a problem for the manufacturer: preserving freshness, supporting branding, and extending shelf life. Together, these layers are a package no U.S. recycling system can recover for future use.

To put the potato chip bag problem in context, consider American packaging waste as a whole. Americans generated roughly 82.2 million tons of containers and packaging in 2018, about 28 percent of all municipal solid waste, according to the EPA’s most recent national accounting. Plastic packaging contributed more than 14.5 million tons of the total. Those figures are now seven years old. EPA has not issued an updated Facts and Figures report since, even as e-commerce shipments and single-serve formats keep multiplying the number of small, lightweight, hard-to-recycle packages moving through American homes.

The freshest picture comes from California, which is now doing what the federal government has stopped doing. CalRecycle’s SB 54 Material Characterization Study, conducted by Cascadia Consulting Group at 16 landfills in early 2025, found that about 8.5 million tons of single-use packaging and foodware were buried in California landfills in 2024, roughly 21 percent of everything the state landfilled that year. Plastic accounted for about 3.1 million tons of that covered material. Flexible and film plastics — the category that includes chip bags — turned up across all sampling sectors, from single-family curbside collection to commercial routes and self-haul loads. One state, one year, and the composite pouch is everywhere the waste auditors looked.

While composite pouches present a recycling challenge, some rigid plastics fare better. The rigid side of the plastic waste stream — PET water bottles, HDPE milk jugs, some polypropylene tubs — has a functioning recovery system. NAPCOR’s 2024 PET Recycling Report put the U.S. PET bottle collection rate at 30.2 percent; over 70 percent of bottles that reach a curbside bin actually are sorted, baled, and reprocessed into new material.

The situation shifts again when looking at flexible packaging specifically. Flexible bags, pouches, wrappers, and refill sacks that have quietly taken over the grocery aisle are a different story. The U.S. Plastics Pact’s most recent impact report reported a combined U.S. plastic packaging recycling rate of 13.3 percent. Flexibles within that number are a rounding error. Most estimates put flexible-packaging recycling in the United States below 2 percent.

Greenpeace’s 2022 assessment concluded that no type of U.S. plastic packaging meets the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of ‘recyclable,’ a 30 percent recycling rate across a region of 400 million people.

Why does the material resist recovery

Three things make flexible plastic packaging structurally hard to recycle:

• Flexible plastic packaging is not made of a single resin but is often three to nine layers of different plastics and metals bonded together. Mechanical recycling requires a clean, mono-material feedstock, and these laminates cannot be separated into their constituent materials.
• Flexible bags are too light for materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to sort effectively. They tangle in screens intended for separating paper from containers, and often jam equipment, prompting shutdowns for removal.
• It has no domestic end market. Before China’s 2018 National Sword policy, a ban on imports of many types of foreign waste, much of the U.S. flexible-packaging stream was exported. That relief valve closed. Domestic reprocessing capacity (U.S.-based facilities to clean and reuse the material) for multi-layer flexibles has not been built because no private processor can make the economics work at the price a commodity market will pay for the bale (a compressed block of collected plastic packaging).

Composite film is what industry insiders call a “residual cost material”—meaning the combined cost of collecting, transporting, and processing it exceeds what any buyer will pay for the recovered commodity. The private market will not recycle it.

What store drop-off actually does

For a decade, the polite answer to “what do I do with this bag?” has been: take it to the front of your grocery store. The bins marked for plastic bags and film — operated by the Wrap Recycling Action Program (WRAP) and branded by retailers including Walmart, Kroger, and Target — accept clean polyethylene films: grocery bags, bread bags, dry-cleaning bags, produce bags, and some case-pack overwrap, but not chip bags and other packaging made with composites that combine plastics, paper, and metals.

Most of the polyethylene that does get captured at drop-off goes into composite lumber — Trex decking is the dominant end market, which is a form of downcycling rather than a closed-loop system. It’s a better outcome than landfill. It is also not what the word “recyclable” on the package implies.

Advanced recycling: real, overstated, and controversial

When mechanical recycling cannot process a feedstock, industry increasingly points to “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, which includes pyrolysis, gasification, and solvent-based depolymerization, as the solution for films and flexibles. The promise: break the polymer down to monomer or fuel-feedstock molecules that can be re-polymerized or combusted.

The promise is technically real, though many critics question its promised results. The scale is not yet. Most operating U.S. pyrolysis facilities produce pyrolysis oil sold as fuel, which, from a climate perspective, is combustion with extra steps. A 2023 NRDC analysis found most “advanced recycling” projects in the U.S. are either producing fuel rather than new plastic or operating at a pilot scale. Facilities designed for polymer-to-polymer chemical recycling, such as Eastman’s Kingsport, Tennessee, plant, and Alterra’s Akron facility, process a small fraction of national flexible-packaging generation.

Twenty-five states have now classified advanced recycling as “manufacturing” rather than waste management, easing permitting requirements and exempting the facilities from solid-waste oversight (regulatory supervision for handling waste). Environmental-justice advocates (groups focused on pollution impacts on vulnerable communities) argue the reclassification moves emissions and solid-residue handling out from under the permitting regime designed to protect fenceline communities (neighborhoods directly next to industrial sites). The argument is not settled.

The EPR turn

The meaningful change in the flexible-packaging story over the past eighteen months has not come from new recycling technology. It has come from policy: seven U.S. states now implement Extended Producer Responsibility laws for packaging.

Oregon’s program went operational on July 1, 2025, with the Circular Action Alliance serving as the producer responsibility organization (PRO) that manages the program, supported by roughly $200 million in producer funding for the first year. The state plans to build out 144 PRO-operated recycling collection centers across the state. Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, Washington, and Maine are at various stages behind Oregon, with California’s SB 54 program — the most expansive of the group — scheduled to be fully activated in 2027.

What EPR changes, in plain terms, is that the producer — the brand that chose the seven-layer laminate for branding and shelf life reasons — now pays for the collection and recovery of the package after a consumer uses it. The fees are eco-modulated: simpler, mono-material, more-recyclable packaging pays less; hard-to-recycle multi-layer flexibles pay more. Over time, the fee differential is intended to push producers toward redesigning packaging.

Why we’re paying for the old ways

The externalities the household pays for without seeing them, from flexible packaging specifically:

• Landfill tipping fees. At the Environmental Research & Education Foundation’s 2024 weighted-average U.S. tipping fee of $62.63 per ton, the flexible-packaging share of the ~14 million tons of plastic packaging generated annually represents hundreds of millions of dollars in direct municipal disposal cost funded through utility bills and solid-waste budgets.
• MRF fire risk. Flexible packaging is the stream that most commonly carries lithium-ion batteries — from disposable vapes, earbud cases, and lithium cells — into the recycling system. Fire Rover’s 2024 annual review reported that publicly tracked MRF and transfer-station fires rose roughly 20 percent year over year, with total damage and operational impact estimated at $1.2 billion annually. Much of that cost is passed through to municipalities in the form of higher processing fees.
• Marine and microplastic pollution. Lightweight flexible packaging is disproportionately represented in litter and marine-debris inventories because it is light enough to blow out of collection vehicles, bins, and landfills. Microplastic shedding from degrading film is a growing concern for surface waters and the food chain.
• Incinerator air quality. When flexibles are combusted in waste-to-energy plants, the emissions include PM2.5 particles, hydrogen chloride from chlorinated layers, and metals from inks and lamination, which disproportionately fall on the communities that host those plants. Sixteen of the twenty largest U.S. incinerators operate in majority or above-average communities of color.

None of these costs appear on the grocery receipt. Yet, you’re paying these fees until EPR programs force producers to do so.

What You Can Do

For individuals and households, you can make these choices:

1. Buy the format that’s actually recyclable where you live. Rigid containers — a jar, a bottle, a tub — can be recycled; flexible pouches in most places cannot. When the product is available in both formats, the rigid is the better environmental choice, even when weight is accounted for.
2. Separate clean polyethylene film for store drop-off. Grocery bags, bread bags, dry-cleaning bags, produce bags, and case-pack overwrap are the films that the WRAP system actually handles. Anything with foil, zippers, or mixed layers should not go in the drop-off bin.
3. Do not put flexible packaging in your curbside bin. In most municipal systems, composite packaging is treated as contamination that reduces the value of the entire load.

At the community and policy level, you can get involved:

1. Support packaging EPR in your state. Seven states have laws; a dozen more have active bills. The programs work only when constituents push, and they push when the programs pass.
2. Ask brands directly. Eco-modulated EPR fees move producers toward better design only if producers perceive consumer pressure alongside the fee. Social-media and direct-contact campaigns targeting specific CPG brands have moved packaging decisions before and will again.
3. Be skeptical of “chemical recycling” claims. When a brand points to a pyrolysis partnership as evidence of circular packaging, ask which facility, what output, and at what scale relative to the package volume the brand puts into the market.

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