On March 20, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a rule change that could fundamentally shift how the federal government regulates a controversial type of plastic recycling called pyrolysis, also known as “advanced recycling.” Currently, the EPA treats pyrolysis plants as incinerators, restricting the release of toxic chemicals. The proposed rule would redefine them as factories, altering longstanding pollution controls.

Though it may seem minor, this rule change would weaken key pollution protections for pyrolysis plants. The result could be increased toxic emissions, with the burden falling on nearby communities—often low-income or predominantly Black, Latino, or Indigenous neighborhoods.

What is pyrolysis?

Pyrolysis involves heating plastic to very high temperatures in a container with little or no oxygen, preventing it from burning as it melts. The plastic breaks down into an oily liquid that can be used to make fuel, or it can be mixed back into the process that creates new plastic. The plastics industry calls this “advanced recycling” or “chemical recycling.” Environmental groups, such as the Ocean Conservancy, have called the process “the latest plastics industry deception.”

There are six pyrolysis plants running in the United States today, in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, and Georgia. More are being built in Arizona and West Virginia. The industry wants to build many more, but says strict EPA rules make it hard to get permits.

Why the rule change matters

The Clean Air Act is the federal law that limits air pollution. One part of it — Section 129 — sets strict rules for incinerators. It requires them to limit nine kinds of pollutants, including dioxins, heavy metals, and tiny particles that lodge deep in human lungs. Pyrolysis plants have been covered by these rules since 2005. The EPA’s new proposal would move them from Section 129 to Section 111, which covers fewer pollutants.

John Walke, a clean air expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Associated Press that the timing is the real problem. Removing the old rule would happen quickly. Writing a new one takes years. In between, he said, a plant could legally turn off its pollution controls.

“You could have a facility that was controlled on a Monday, preventing those hazardous air pollutants from being emitted into the atmosphere, and on Tuesday, the facility would have legal permission to turn off installed pollution controls,” Walke said. The reason a company would do that, he added, is simple: running pollution control equipment costs money.

James Pew of Earthjustice, a group that takes environmental cases to court, put it more bluntly to Inside Climate News: “As a practical matter, this definition change would mean EPA is completely deregulating a whole class of incinerators, these so-called pyrolysis units. And their pollution is really toxic.”

What the plastics industry says

The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastic companies, has lobbied for this change for years. Ross Eisenberg, who leads its plastics group, told the Associated Press that pyrolysis is not the same as burning. “The definition of incineration is to destroy it, right? You’re literally trying to make it go away,” he said. “That’s not what they’re doing here. They are trying to preserve it and recover the materials, which is recycling, which is manufacturing.”

Eisenberg argues that chemical recycling plants are already heavily regulated, citing other parts of the Clean Air Act that would still cover them, as well as requirements associated with state-level permits.

What scientists have actually found

The science on pyrolysis is at best mixed and can be partisan. A 2023 study by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, found that mixing even a small amount of pyrolysis oil into new plastic production cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 18% to 23% compared to making plastic from scratch. The researchers used real operating data from eight U.S. pyrolysis facilities between 2017 and 2021.

But a 2025 paper in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering concludes that, depending on the size of the plant and how its emissions are measured, the same process can produce anywhere from 28% less to 30% more greenhouse gas emissions than ordinary fossil-fuel-based plastic production. The paper also notes that pyrolysis facilities release volatile organic compounds, fine particles, and a group of cancer-linked chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Those emissions, the authors wrote, fall hardest on communities that are mostly low-income or marginalized.

A 2023 report by Beyond Plastics found that of 11 chemical recycling plants then operating in the U.S., seven were sited in environmental justice communities. Six of those seven were pyrolysis plants.

Pyrolysis can reduce some forms of pollution while creating others, and the people who breathe those other emissions are usually not the ones making decisions about where plants are built.

How the public weighed in

The EPA gave the public 45 days to submit comments, from March 20 to May 4, 2026. Environmental groups organized quickly. A group including the Public Interest Research Group, Environment America, and Environmental Action collected and submitted more than 27,000 comments asking the agency to keep treating pyrolysis as incineration. The groups argue that pyrolysis can release up to 96 different toxic chemicals, including some linked to cancer and harm to developing children.

At a public hearing, a dozen speakers from Moms Clean Air Force testified against the change. Kiya Stanford, the group’s Georgia organizer, said the proposed rule “feels like a move to prioritize polluters over people.”

Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator who now runs Beyond Plastics, told Inside Climate News she was puzzled by how the change was announced. “I thought, could it be a mistake, or are they quietly trying to push this through?” she asked. The pyrolysis paragraph was buried inside a 17-page rule about wood waste burning.

Where to follow what happens next

The official record for this rule lives on the federal website regulations.gov, in docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0068. Every public comment, every supporting document, and the EPA’s eventual decision will appear there.

The first comment window closed on May 4. The EPA can still accept late comments, but it doesn’t have to count them. The bigger opportunity for public input is still ahead: the EPA said the comments collected on this docket will help it draft a new, separate rule focused entirely on advanced recycling. That second rule has not yet been published. When it is, the public will get another comment period of at least 30 days, often 45 to 60.

What You Can Do

• Follow the rules’ progress. Go to regulations.gov and search for EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0068. You can subscribe to email alerts to receive updates when the EPA posts.
• Be ready to comment on the next rule. When the EPA publishes its dedicated pyrolysis rule — likely later this year or next — you will have a chance to submit a public comment. Even a short, clear comment becomes part of the official record.
• Find out if a plant is near you. Pyrolysis plants are operating or under construction in Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, Georgia, Arizona, and West Virginia. If you live in one of those areas, state-level air quality rules will matter more than ever.
• Ask brands what “recycled” really means. Some products labeled as containing recycled plastic don’t actually contain recycled molecules. They use a paper accounting system called mass balance. Asking companies to explain their labels is a fair question.
• Use less plastic. The whole debate is about what to do with plastic after it exists. Choosing durable goods, refilling instead of replacing, and skipping single-use packaging keeps plastic out of the system entirely.

When the decision is likely

The current rule has two parts that move on different schedules. The disaster-recovery section involving wood waste is on a fast track. The EPA said it wants to finish that before the 2026 hurricane and wildfire season, which means a final decision is likely between late spring and early summer 2026.

The pyrolysis part will take until next year. The EPA has not announced a target date for its dedicated pyrolysis rule. Based on how quickly the agency is moving and what industry groups have told reporters, a reasonable guess is that a new proposed rule will appear in late 2026 or the first half of 2027, with a final version possibly in 2027 or 2028.

The National Resources Defense Council has announced plans to sue if the rule is finalized, a step that could delay implementation further. The EPA’s upcoming publication of its dedicated pyrolysis rule is the next key moment, as it will determine whether the government continues to uphold or dismantle existing pollution protections. This decision will shape the future of advanced plastic recycling in the U.S.

The post The EPA Is Changing the Rules for Plastic Recycling Plants appeared first on Earth911.

Nine million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That is the projected climate cost of the 48-team, three-country, 16-city soccer tournament that kicks off June 11 in Mexico City — nearly double the average emissions of every World Cup held between 2010 and 2022.

The figure comes from a peer-reviewed analysis published by Scientists for Global Responsibility, the Environmental Defense Fund, Cool Down, the Sport for Climate Action Network, and the New Weather Institute. Their conclusion: FIFA’s decision to expand the tournament and spread it across a continent has locked in a climate footprint that no amount of host-city recycling or LED lighting can offset.

Which makes the question of which host cities are doing serious sustainability work more important, not less. Their practices will outlast the tournament.

The Problem Is Structural

World Cup-related team air travel will account for roughly 7.7 million tons of CO2-equivalent — about 85% of the total, according to the SGR analysis. That is the direct consequence of two FIFA decisions. First, the tournament grew from 32 to 48 teams and from 64 to 104 matches. Second, FIFA chose to hold those matches across Canada, Mexico, and the United States rather than concentrate them in a single region.

The contrast with the previous tournament is stark. Qatar 2022 kept its eight stadiums within 34 miles of each other. The shortest distance between 2026 stadiums, from MetLife in New Jersey to Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, is 95.5 miles. Most teams’ itineraries cover thousands of miles. One UEFA playoff winner, according to a Fossil Free Football analysis, could travel Toronto to Los Angeles (2,175 miles), then Los Angeles to Seattle (932 miles), then, in the knockout rounds, another 2,500 miles to Boston.

FIFA does not set binding emissions limits for host cities, and it did not address the underlying decision to spread the tournament across North America. SGR’s researchers urged FIFA to reverse the team expansion, set mandatory environmental standards, and end sponsorship deals with high-emitting companies, including the Saudi oil company Aramco, whose sponsorship is estimated to result in an additional 30 million tons of CO2e due to energy sales linked to the tournament’s promotion.

The Heat Risk Nobody Planned For

Climate change is not just an abstraction measured in tournament emissions. It is a condition players and fans will experience in real time. The SGR/EDF report assessed heat, flooding, and extreme weather risk at all 16 stadiums. Six face extreme heat stress due to Wet Bulb Globe Temperatures above 80°F, the threshold where exertion becomes dangerous. Eight of the 16 cities require what the researchers called immediate environmental intervention. Four need critical intervention, according to the report.

AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, which will host nine World Cup matches — more than any other venue — experiences 37 days per year above 95°F, with July wet bulb readings that exceed FIFA safety thresholds.

Houston’s NRG Stadium faces simultaneous heat, flooding, and wildfire risk.

Los Angeles contends with wildfire smoke.

Miami faces hurricanes.

Where Host Cities Lead, and Where They Lag

A sustainability ranking published by World Sports Network in April 2026 attempts to score the 16 host cities across transit access, electric vehicle infrastructure, waste, air pollution, urban greening, and greenhouse gas emissions. The methodology has limits — it weights all factors equally, uses stadium-specific data alongside city-wide data, and includes some questionable proxies — but its directional finding is consistent with what urban sustainability researchers have long documented about the climate in North American cities.

Vancouver tops the rankings. British Columbia generates roughly 95% of its electricity from renewable sources, largely hydropower. BC Place sits in the center of Vancouver, with 26 public transit stops within a 10-minute walk. Fans can reach it by SkyTrain or bus. That single design decision eliminates most of the vehicle trips and parking-lot sprawl that define a typical U.S. stadium day.

Boston ranked second, the highest-scoring U.S. city. That is less about inherent greenness than about what severe flooding has forced the city to prepare for. Boston experienced 19 days of flooding in 2024, and sea levels around the city are projected to rise 20 centimeters by 2030 relative to 2000. The city’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance requires large buildings to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, with interim targets that have already tightened performance at Gillette Stadium’s surrounding infrastructure.

Mexico City placed third, Toronto fourth, Monterrey fifth. The pattern shows that four of the top five cities are outside the United States, even though 11 of the 16 host cities are American. Mexico City’s transformation from one of the most polluted major cities in the world into one of the Americas’ most active urban reforesters, with over 27 million trees and plants added between 2018 and 2021, is the kind of long-horizon work that does not fit inside a tournament timeline but shapes what that timeline makes possible.

The American Transit Problem

Every U.S. host city except Boston falls in the bottom half of the WSN ranking, and the reason is almost always the same: transit.

AT&T Stadium in Arlington has no public transit stops within a 10-minute walk. Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, which will host seven matches, sits 17 miles north of downtown Miami with no rail connection. SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, MetLife in East Rutherford, and NRG in Houston all require a car, a shuttle, or a rideshare for most attendees.

Dallas-Fort Worth is ranked third in the world for transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, a structural problem no single event can fix. The Dallas organizing committee has built a sustainability plan in collaboration with the University of Texas at Arlington’s chief sustainability officer, Meghna Tare. It addresses waste management, single-use plastic reduction, composting, and community legacy. The North Central Texas Council of Governments has designed a charter bus system to fill the transit gap for the nine matches AT&T Stadium will host. These are real efforts. They also show that when infrastructure is car-dependent, event-specific workarounds can reduce harm but don’t substitute for the public transit that does not exist.

What This Means Beyond the Tournament

The 2026 World Cup will be a 34-day event watched by a projected 5 million in-person fans and up to 6 billion viewers worldwide. The emissions it generates will dissipate into an atmosphere that cannot tell tournament carbon from commuting carbon. What will persist are the infrastructure choices each host city makes now, including whether transit lines are extended or not, stadium renovations that meet LEED standards or do not, food recovery programs that continue operating after the final match or get packed away with the branded signage.

These are not reasons to hate world football. It’s the Beautiful Game, and its governing body, FIFA, can make changes to reduce the tournament’s impact and protect players from heat-related injuries.

The post The 2026 World Cup Will Be the Most Polluting Ever appeared first on Earth911.

Just over half the country is officially in drought, and about 155.7 million Americans—almost seven million more than last week—are now affected. The U.S. Drought Monitor’s April 23 report shows that 52.46% of the United States and Puerto Rico, and 62.78% of the Lower 48, are experiencing moderate drought or worse. According to NOAA, this is the worst spring drought on record for the continental United States.

This drought is not limited to one region. The Southeast just had its driest September-through-March since records began in 1895. The Colorado River system is only 36% full. Texas is 77% in drought, and Corpus Christi’s reservoirs have dropped to nearly 9%. Nebraska experienced its largest wildfire ever, fueled by dry grasslands. Oregon’s snowpack reached zero on April 1. In California, Tahoe City Cross melted completely by March 8, 40 days earlier than usual, after a record-breaking March heat wave caused rapid melting of an already low snowpack across most of the West.

The common factor is that from January through March, precipitation was below 70% of average across the lower 48 states, setting a new record. As a result, water restrictions are now broader and, in many places, more severe than usual.

The National Picture

The headline numbers come from the U.S. Drought Monitor, which is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center, USDA, and NOAA. As of April 21, drought conditions had worsened across the South, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, High Plains, and West, with a 2.9% increase in coverage over the past week and an 11.7% increase over the past month. The Northeast and parts of Texas and the eastern Plains saw modest improvement; everywhere else trended drier.

Two main climate factors have caused this record drought. First, La Niña led to less rainfall from January to March, with totals below 70% of average—the lowest since records began in 1895, just surpassing the previous low in 1910. Second, spring temperatures in the Central Plains, Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic were 5 to 10 degrees above normal, which sped up soil moisture loss and increased evaporation. This drought is not just about low rainfall; high temperatures are also drying out what little moisture remains.

The effects of the drought are already clear in the number of wildfires. By mid-April, over 1.7 million acres had burned across the country, nearly double the 10-year average. Nebraska’s Morrill Fire, which burned more than 640,000 acres in March, was the largest in the state’s history. In southeastern Georgia, the Highway 82 Fire destroyed at least 54 structures in Brantley County, which was the first county in the Southeast to reach exceptional drought (“D4”).

Southwest: The Colorado River Approaches a Threshold

The Colorado River Basin is facing water shortages not seen in modern times. The Bureau of Reclamation says the system is at about 36% of capacity. Lake Powell is only 23% full, and Lake Mead is about one-third full. Spring runoff into Lake Powell is expected to be just 22% of average. If this continues, 2026 could be one of the driest years in over sixty years, possibly even drier than 2002, which was the previous record.

In response, the Bureau of Reclamation announced in April that it plans to cut Lake Powell releases to 6 million acre-feet, the lowest in decades. They will also move water from Flaming Gorge to keep Lake Powell high enough for Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydropower. The dam provides electricity to about five million people, but water levels could drop too low by December if things do not improve. The seven states that share the Colorado River have not agreed on new rules for after 2026, when current guidelines expire. The Interior Department has said it may set new rules on its own if no agreement is reached this summer. Western states could be heading toward a conflict over water.

Local water restrictions are getting stricter. In March 2026, Erie, Colorado, moved to a Level 4 Emergency, the highest stage, which bans all residential sprinkler use. Aurora has completely banned new turf lawns. Denver Water started Stage 1 restrictions, asking residents to cut both indoor and outdoor water use by 20% until October 1. Along the Rio Grande, Elephant Butte is at 12.6% capacity, Falcon at 19.2%, and Amistad at 31.4%.

California: Permanent Rules Meet a Fourth Dry Year

California’s situation is more complex than just being in drought or not. In January 2026, the Drought Monitor showed no part of California in drought for the first time in 25 years. By April, Southern California was facing its fourth straight year of below-average rainfall. The statewide snowpack was only 18% of normal, and the State Water Project will limit water releases to 30% of normal.

What’s notable is that California’s restrictions no longer depend on whether a drought is officially declared. After the 2012-2017 drought, the state moved to a permanent year-round conservation framework codified by state law AB 1572 and the State Water Resources Control Board’s “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” rules.

Statewide baseline rules apply every year, regardless of conditions: no hosing down driveways or hardscape; no irrigation within 48 hours of rainfall; no irrigation runoff into streets or storm drains; mandatory shutoff nozzles on hoses; and recirculation requirements for fountains and decorative water features.

On top of these restrictions, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, issued a Level 1 conservation notice in March 2026 to all 26 city and county agency members. State enforcement of the new water-budget rules is paused until 2027 to give utilities time to adjust.

California is in for a dry summer this year.

Southeast: A Recharge Season That Failed

The Southeast, usually a humid region, is now facing a record drought. Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina all had their driest September-through-March since 1895. Normally, the region relies on December through March to restore soil moisture, streamflows, and groundwater, but this year, that recharge mostly did not occur.

The result, as of April: 100% of North Carolina, 99.95% of Virginia, 99.34% of South Carolina, 98.99% of Florida, 98.13% of Georgia, 93.65% of Tennessee, and 88.66% of Alabama are in drought. In Georgia, extreme drought now covers 71% of the state, the highest reading since 2012. Some monitoring stations with 75 or more years of data are recording their driest six-month periods on record. Drought watches are active across Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama, with mandatory rules likely if late-spring rainfall doesn’t materialize.

Texas and the Southern Plains: Cities at the Edge

Texas is 77% in drought as of mid-April. The Coastal Bend story is the one to watch closely. Combined storage at Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi has fallen to 8.7% as of April 2026 — among the lowest levels ever recorded. Corpus Christi has been under Stage 3 mandatory restrictions since December 2024, the most severe stage in the city’s standard drought contingency plan, which is triggered when combined reservoir storage drops below 20% capacity. Stage 3 bans all outdoor irrigation, home vehicle washing, and most non-essential outdoor water use; second and subsequent violations carry fines up to $2,000 each.

The bigger concern is what happens next. City models now predict a Level 1 Water Emergency by September 2026, when the water supply could be just 180 days from running out. On April 28, 2026, the City Council postponed a vote on a proposal that would require everyone—residents, businesses, and industry—to cut water use by 25% if Level 1 is declared. Many residents at the meeting said this cut would be impossible unless industrial users reduce even more.

If Corpus Christi runs out of water—a scenario city officials now consider possible—it would be the first modern American city to face this. There is no guidebook for what to do. In the worst case, the city could see rolling water shutoffs by district, water delivered by tanker trucks, and even managed evacuations. The largest industrial users, such as petrochemical refineries, would likely lose access to water first, potentially leading to lawsuits.

In other parts of Texas, Dallas has had a permanent rule since 2001 that only allows watering lawns two days a week, and no irrigation is allowed between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. from April to October. In Oklahoma and Kansas, the Ranger Road Fire—the largest U.S. wildfire of 2026 so far—burned 283,283 acres in February, killed hundreds of livestock, and led to burn bans across central and eastern Oklahoma.

High Plains: Dust, Fire, and Lake Beds

Nebraska is experiencing conditions that one state climatologist said are unlike anything seen before. Fifty-six percent of the state is in extreme drought, similar to 2012 but with warmer temperatures. The Morrill Fire started in March and quickly spread through dry grasslands, burning over 640,000 acres—the largest wildfire in Nebraska’s history. In Sheridan County, some landowners say their private lakes have dried up completely for the first time since 2012.

The Black Hills in South Dakota are now in extreme drought. In southern Nebraska, southwest Kansas, and southeast Colorado, low rainfall combined with high temperatures and evaporation have made spring planting difficult in many areas. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that streamflows are below or much below normal across southwestern South Dakota, southern Nebraska, and central and western Kansas.

Mandatory urban restrictions in this region are still relatively rare, but burn bans are widespread, and ranchers are culling cattle herds rather than feeding them on pastures with no grass.

Pacific Northwest: A Snow Drought, Not a Rain Drought

The Pacific Northwest had more precipitation this winter than the Southwest, but most of it fell as rain instead of snow because of record-warm temperatures. This has caused a snow drought rather than a rain drought. Since the region relies on snowpack for summer water, this is a serious problem.

Across the broader Columbia River Basin, snowpack ranks in the second percentile. On April 8, Washington’s Department of Ecology declared a statewide Drought Emergency, citing snowpack at just 53% of the median and projected summer water supply below 75% of normal in many basins, including the Yakima. Junior water-rights holders in the Yakima Basin are projected to receive only 44% of their allotment. Idaho is facing what could be its fourth consecutive drought year in its northern basins.

For the Northwest, the effects go beyond just this summer. New research from Oregon State University predicts that by the end of the century, water will move from precipitation to streamflow about 18% faster on average. This happens because there is less snow and more rain, so water moves through the system more quickly instead of slowly melting from snowpack. As a result, there could be about 50% less water in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs during the summer growing season.

The shift toward earlier runoff seen in 2026 is not a one-time event. It is a preview of the more severe impacts that climate change could bring.

Where Restrictions Are Active

This is a partial snapshot as of April 27, 2026. Local utilities update stages weekly. Verify before relying on these figures.

Region	Location	Stage / Action	Notes
Southwest	Erie, CO	Level 4 Emergency	All residential sprinklers banned; most severe Front Range stage
Southwest	Aurora, CO	Stage 1 + turf ban	New turf lawn installations prohibited
Southwest	Denver, CO	Stage 1 (through Oct. 1)	Watering schedule by address
California	MWD Southern Calif. region	Level 1 conservation notice	Issued March 2026; covers 19M residents
California	San Francisco (SFPUC)	Level 2	Tied to Hetch Hetchy levels
California	Sacramento	Stage 2	Folsom Lake at 48%
Southeast	SW Florida (SWFWMD)	Phase III (Apr 3 – Jul 1)	Possible extension if summer rains fail
Southeast	Raleigh, NC	Mandatory Stage 1 (from Apr 20)	Odd/even address watering schedule
Southeast	Valdosta, GA	Mandatory 1-day/week (from Apr 15)	First Georgia city to move to mandatory rules
Texas	Corpus Christi	Stage 3 — Reservoir Crisis	Reservoirs at 8.7%; 25% cut planned for September
Texas	Dallas	Permanent 2-day/week	Ordinance since 2001; no irrigation 10am–6pm Apr–Oct
Pacific NW	Washington (statewide)	Drought Emergency (Apr 8)	Snowpack at 53% of median; Yakima Basin junior rights cut to 44%
Pacific NW	Oregon (snow drought)	No statewide order yet	Snow water equivalent at zero percentile on April 1

What You Can Do

Households use about 10% of all water in the U.S. Agriculture is still the biggest user, but in cities with restrictions, saving water at home can help prevent stricter rules, fines, or limits on businesses. The EPA’s WaterSense program says the average American family uses about 300 gallons a day, and simple upgrades can cut indoor use by 35%.

Indoor (immediate, no cost):

• Check your home for leaks. On average, American homes waste over 11,000 gallons a year from running toilets and dripping faucets. A single toilet leak can waste 200 gallons a day. To test for leaks, put food coloring in the tank—if it shows up in the bowl without flushing, you have a leak.
• Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth or shaving. This can save 8 to 10 gallons per person each day.
• Only run your dishwasher and washing machine when they are full. You can also skip pre-rinsing dishes.
• Take shorter showers. Reducing your shower by two minutes with a standard showerhead can save about 5 gallons of water.

Indoor (small investment):

• Install WaterSense-labeled fixtures. Faucet aerators and showerheads use at least 20% less water and are inexpensive. The average family can save about 3,500 gallons of water and 410 kWh of energy each year just by using these.
• Replace any toilet made before 1992. Older toilets use 4 gallons per flush, while WaterSense models use 1.28 gallons or less.

Outdoor (where most savings can happen):

• Outdoor irrigation uses nearly 9 billion gallons of water a day nationwide. It makes up about 30% of household water use, and up to 70% in dry areas. Water your yard before sunrise or after sunset to reduce evaporation.
• Consider replacing your lawn with drought-tolerant plants that are suited to your region. This type of landscaping uses less than half the water of a traditional lawn. Many cities, such as Aurora, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, offer rebates for replacing turf.
• Install a smart irrigation controller with a rain shutoff or soil moisture sensor. These devices adjust watering based on real conditions instead of following a set schedule.
• Add 2 to 3 inches of wood chips as mulch to your flower beds and vegetable gardens. This helps reduce evaporation and keeps weeds down.

Community and policy:

• Find out your utility’s current drought stage and the rules that apply. Most utilities post this information online and let you report water waste, like irrigation during banned hours or broken sprinklers spraying onto pavement.
• If you’re in an HOA, know your rights. California’s AB 1572 and Texas Property Code §202.007 prohibit HOAs from fining residents for brown lawns during active water restrictions. Other states are following this example.
• Pay attention to how agriculture and industry use water in your area. While homes use only about 10% of water, decisions about the other 90%—used by farms and businesses—will shape whether household conservation efforts make a lasting difference.

The Big Climate Picture

Some may see the 2026 drought as just a mix of La Niña, a warm winter, and early snowmelt, with rain expected to return as conditions change and an El Niño watch begins for late summer. While this is partly true, the bigger pattern—record warmth, snow falling as rain, earlier and faster runoff, and reservoirs unable to keep up as demand rises during hotter, longer summers—is what climate science has predicted for nearly twenty years.

Lake Powell is at 23%. Oregon’s snowpack is gone. North Carolina is completely in drought. Corpus Christi is preparing for the chance of running out of water. These are not separate stories. They are all part of the same story, showing what aridification looks like when it becomes a daily reality instead of just a forecast.

Editor’s note: Drought conditions are evolving weekly. Statistics in this piece are current as of the U.S. Drought Monitor release dated April 21–23, 2026. Local water restrictions change frequently — verify with your utility before relying on the figures cited here.

The post The 2026 Drought, Region by Region appeared first on Earth911.

Run an insect trap through a German nature reserve today and it will catch a fraction of the insects it would have trapped in 1989. Entomologists in the Krefeld region did exactly that, season after season, and when they totaled 27 years of catch they found flying insect biomass had fallen more than 75 percent inside protected areas, where nature is supposed to be safe.

Since the turn of the century, two crashes have run in parallel: a steady draining of vertebrate life we know, including the mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles we notice, and a quieter, vaster loss of insects, the wildlife almost no one counts but nearly everything depends on. Much of the underlying data describing the loss of biodiversity reaches back to 1970. What belongs to this century is precise measurement built on long-term studies that matured after 2000 and turned scattered alarm into a documented trend. This is what we have lost while we were watching, and what that loss takes from the generations who come after.

The vertebrate ledger

According to the World Wildlife Foundation and Zoological Society of London’s 2024 Living Planet Report, between 1970 and 2020, the average monitored population of 5,495 vertebrate species shrank by 73 percent. That figure is widely misread, so state it precisely: it does not mean three-quarters of all animals are gone. It means that across the populations scientists track, the average decline was 73 percent, with roughly half falling while half held steady or grew. The average is pulled down by steep losses, including freshwater animal populations that are down 85 percent and wildlife in Latin America and the Caribbean down 95 percent.

The losses are not evenly spread. In North America, a 2019 study in Science tallied a net loss of nearly 3 billion breeding birds since 1970—about one in four—across 529 species, including common backyard birds nobody thought were at risk.

Amphibians are in the worst shape of any vertebrate group. The second Global Amphibian Assessment, published in 2023, found 41 percent of species threatened with extinction, with climate change driving 39 percent of the deteriorations recorded since 2004.

Some losses are now permanent at a level above the species. In a 2023 paper, Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich documented that 73 entire vertebrate genera—whole branches of the animal family tree, not single twigs—have gone extinct since 1500, a rate they argue is far faster than the background pace of the past million years. The IUCN Red List, the most comprehensive tally we have, now lists more than 47,000 of its 169,000-plus inventory of species as threatened.

The insect crash almost no one sees

Vertebrates, which tend to the fuzzy and cute, are the animals we grieve. Insects are the ones we depend on, and their decline is harder to see because so few long-term counts exist. But the Krefeld study cracked that open in 2017. Its more-than-75-percent biomass drop could not be explained by weather, habitat type, or land use inside the reserves—the decline was systemic, not local.

A 2020 meta-analysis in Science, combining 166 long-term datasets, put the trend on a global footing: terrestrial insects are declining roughly 9 percent per decade. The same analysis carried a genuinely hopeful finding, that freshwater insects in some regions were recovering, a rebound the authors link to decades of cleaning up polluted rivers and lakes. Declines varied enough from place to place that local action clearly matters. The crash is neither uniform nor does it represent destiny; human decisions can change the future of biodiversity.

The vertebrate and insect declines are not separate emergencies. They feed each other. Insects are the base of the terrestrial food web. The birds North America lost are, in large part, insectivores that ran short of food. Pull biomass out of the bottom and the animals above it follow.

Insects also do work the economy quietly runs on. The IPBES global pollinator assessment found that about 75 percent of the world’s leading food crops depend at least partly on animal pollination. Eighty-seven of the 115 most important crops, from apples and coffee to cocoa, are dependent on robust insect life for pollination. Decomposition of waste, pest control, and soil formation lean on insects too.

These are services no human system currently prices, and none we know how to replace at scale; visions of robotic pollinators, while shiny promises, are far narrower options than the headlines suggest. The machines that work today operate only in controlled environments on crops that already pollinate themselves. Arugga’s ground robots and Polybee’s airflow drones lift greenhouse tomato and berry yields somewhere between 5 and 20 percent, doing the job a handheld wand or a captive bumblebee would otherwise do indoors.

Harvard’s RoboBee, in development since 2013, learned to land reliably in 2025 and still flies on an external tether, carrying no power, sensors, or brain of its own. Nothing on the horizon pollinates an almond orchard or a squash field the way a wild bee does—for free, across miles, while reproducing itself. The robots are a useful supplement for high-value crops under glass and a poor stand-in for the living systems the insect crash is dismantling.

What the next generation inherits

This is where the loss becomes a loss to the future, the question this series keeps returning to.

A child born this year will inherit a thinner world,with fewer birds at the feeder, fewer insects on the windshield, fewer fish in the river. That is the visible loss. The harder losses are what disappear before ever being catalogued: species that vanish unstudied, taking with them chemistry, behavior, and genetic strategies that might have seeded a medicine, a crop trait, or a material we cannot yet imagine because the organism that suggested it is gone.

Extinction is the one environmental harm with no recovery path. A polluted river can be cleaned; a warmed atmosphere can, in principle, be cooled over centuries. A lineage that ends does not come back. The crashes of the past quarter-century are, in that sense, the most irreversible losses we are recording.

The evidence also refuses despair. Half the tracked vertebrate populations are stable or growing. Raptors and waterfowl in North America rebounded after targeted protection and the banning of specific chemicals. Freshwater insects recover where water quality improves. The losses are real and largely human-caused, which means human choices still bend the curve.

What You Can Do

• Make a patch of ground work for insects. Native plants, no pesticides, and leaf litter left over winter give pollinators and the food web a foothold—even a balcony planter counts.
• Cut light pollution. Shielded, warm-toned outdoor lighting on timers eases a documented and growing pressure on nocturnal insects.
• Support long-term monitoring. Community-science projects—bird counts, butterfly and bee surveys—supply the very datasets that made these crashes visible in the first place.
• Push where large-scale impact can happen. Individual yards help locally; pesticide rules, habitat corridors, and protected-area funding decide outcomes at the landscape level. Back them.
• Ease land pressure through what you eat. Habitat conversion for agriculture is a leading driver of both crashes; cutting food waste and high-impact consumption lowers it.

The post Vertebrate and Insect Extinctions in the 21st Century appeared first on Earth911.

Nevada just shattered its March statewide high temperature record by 6 degrees, which is a ‘72 miles per hour in a school zone’ kind of margin. And it happened during the hottest 11-year stretch in 176 years of recorded temperature tracking.

A mid-March heat wave in the American West pushed temperatures in Laughlin, Nevada, to 106°F, far above the previous March record of 100°F. The fact that this happened in March is alarming, especially since it coincided with a near-total collapse of the region’s snowpack. This sets the stage for an early and possibly severe wildfire season. The heat also fits a troubling trend confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization last week: 2015 through 2025 have been the 11 warmest years ever recorded on Earth.

Usually, temperature records are broken by small amounts. What happened in Nevada last month was very different. Some places broke monthly high temperature records by as much as 8 degrees. Reno had seven days above 80°F in March, compared to the previous record of just two days. “It’s not just that we broke monthly records,” said Nevada State Climatologist Baker Perry, “but it’s by how much we broke the monthly records, and not just in one place.”

A Snow Drought That Wasn’t in the Forecast

The heat wave didn’t hit a typical winter landscape. Nevada was already experiencing what Perry calls an unprecedented snow drought. Even though winter precipitation was close to normal and there were big storms in mid-February, warm, moist air arrived soon after. This caused what the National Weather Service called the second-highest single-day snowmelt ever recorded in the eastern Sierra, only surpassed by flooding in 1997.

Normally, snow melts slowly through April and May, but this year it happened all at once in late February and early March. SNOTEL monitoring stations across Nevada show the impact clearly: 70% of sites in northern and central Nevada now report zero inches of snowpack. That’s not just low—it’s gone. The incidence of drought is closely correlated with rising atmospheric CO2 levels recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which is threatened with defunding by the Trump Administration.

What worries scientists most is the combination of these events. “To have these two unprecedented, exceptional events happening at once is a combination that is particularly concerning,” Perry said.

What This Means for Fire Season

Wildfire risk isn’t only about heat. It depends on the sequence of conditions leading up to fire season, and this year’s setup is especially dangerous.

The snowmelt and early rains caused plants to grow weeks ahead of schedule. This early growth creates lots of fine fuels. As these plants dry out over the spring—now with less moisture from snowpack—they become the kindling that can fuel fast-moving fires.

Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District Division Chief August Isernhagen said the early green-up could lead to conditions we haven’t seen before as fire season approaches. He urged people to be even more careful than in recent drought years.

“The majority of our starts, and nearly all of our catastrophic fires are human caused,” Isernhagen said in a statement from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Mountain forests face another challenge. Dawn Johnson, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the NWS in Reno, explained that losing snowpack this early means heavy timber can become drought-stressed much sooner than usual, turning it into a fire hazard months earlier than normal. A cooler storm pattern expected in early April might bring some relief, but experts warn it may be too little, too late to make a real difference.

Eleven Years. No Exceptions.

The Nevada heat wave wasn’t an isolated event. It happened during the longest stretch of global heat ever recorded.

The WMO’s State of the Global Climate 2025 report, released on March 23, confirmed that every year from 2015 to 2025 is among the hottest ever recorded. Depending on the data, 2025 was either the second- or third-warmest year since records began, with temperatures about 1.43°C above pre-industrial levels. Atmospheric CO₂ reached its highest level in 2 million years, and ocean temperatures set a new record for the ninth year in a row.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres put the streak in stark terms: “When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.”

The report also introduced a new measure called Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI). This tracks the difference between the energy the planet receives from the sun and the energy it sends back into space. In 2025, EEI was at its highest since records began in 1960. Surface temperatures, which get most of the attention, only show about 1% of the planet’s extra heat. Over 91% is absorbed by the oceans, which have taken in the equivalent of about 18 times the world’s total annual energy use each year for the past 20 years. EEI gives a clearer picture, showing that the planet is becoming more out of balance.

“In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding caused thousands of deaths, impacted millions of people and caused billions in economic losses,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She added that the changes driven by human activities “will have harmful repercussions for hundreds — and potentially thousands — of years.”

What’s happening in the Western U.S. matches the WMO’s global findings perfectly. The report highlighted major glacier loss in 2025 along North America’s Pacific coast. These events aren’t separate—they’re both signs of the same warming trend, just showing up in different ways and times.

“We seem to be entering this new era where temperatures will be significantly higher than what they were ten years ago,” said climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick of Australian National University. She explained that the changes of the past three years can only be explained by climate change.

What About the Cold in the East?

This is where things get both surprising and important.

If you live in the Northeast, Midwest, or Southeast, 2025 might not seem like a record-warm year. Some parts of the eastern U.S. have had cold snaps and severe winter weather that made national news. So how does that fit with 11 straight years of record global heat?

This actually makes sense in climate science. Climate change doesn’t warm every place at the same time. Instead, it disrupts atmospheric patterns like the polar vortex, which usually keeps cold air over the Arctic. As the Arctic warms much faster than the rest of the planet—about four times the global average, according to NOAA—the polar vortex weakens and shifts, letting cold air move into areas that don’t usually get it.

In other words, the same forces causing record heat in Nevada are also behind the unusual cold in the eastern U.S. These aren’t opposites—they’re both results of a destabilized climate system. Weather feels local, but our climate is shared. When the West is hot in March and the East is cold, both are signs of the same disrupted system.

What You Can Do

• If you live in the West, check current wildfire risk conditions through the National Interagency Fire Center and understand your local evacuation routes and readiness steps before fire season peaks.
• Lower the risk of starting fires. Most wildfires are caused by people, so be extra careful during high-risk times. Don’t have campfires during bans, avoid dragging chains on your vehicle or trailer, and make sure your equipment doesn’t create sparks.
• Support climate policy at both the state and federal levels. Reach out to your Congressional representatives. The WMO data shows the trend is clear. The decisions we make now will shape how severe fire seasons are in the future.
• Cut your home’s carbon footprint by using energy efficiently, choosing cleaner transportation, and making changes to your diet. One person’s actions won’t solve the global problem, but when many people make changes, it can have a real impact on emissions.
• If you live in the eastern U.S., don’t let cold winters make you ignore climate data. Pay attention to what’s happening across the country—the same atmosphere connects us all.

Related Reading on Earth911

How to Prepare Your Home for Wildfire Season

The post The West Is Burning Before Summer Even Starts, and It’s No Accident appeared first on Earth911.

At one point, the Pacific Northwest lost three square miles of old-growth forest every week to clearcutting. Now, the Trump administration is returning to this practice.

In February 2026, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed changes to management plans for nearly 2.5 million acres of Oregon forests. The goal is to increase timber production fourfold and remove protections for old-growth forests and the endangered species that rely on them.

This proposal comes at a time when science is revealing even more about the importance of these forests. They are some of the best carbon-storing ecosystems on Earth, vital reservoirs of biodiversity, and essential for the communities nearby. If lost, they cannot be replaced within any human lifetime.

What Is an Old-Growth Forest?

Researchers first used the term in the 1970s to describe complex, biodiverse forests at least 150 years old. Still, there is no single definition for “old growth.” In the U.S., a federal rule protects trees over 21 inches in diameter in six national forests, where most old-growth forests are found. Many environmentalists define old growth as any forest that has never been logged. All definitions focus on complexity: old-growth forests have layered canopies, fallen logs in different stages of decay, and an understory full of fungi, ferns, and centuries of stored soil carbon.

In western Oregon, this complexity shows in Douglas fir and western red cedar trees that grow up to 200 feet tall, covered in moss so thick it hides their trunks. Even today, these forests are among the most productive timberlands in the world.

The Carbon Case, Revised and Strengthened

It was once believed that only young forests accumulated carbon while old forests merely stored it. Scientists now know that is wrong. A landmark global analysis of 519 forest carbon-flux estimates found that in forests aged 15 to 800 years, net carbon balance is usually positive. Old forests keep sequestering — they are not neutral.

A 2024 study in AGU Advances compared old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest to younger managed forests. It found that old-growth forests produce more biomass for each unit of water used, keep storing carbon even as they age, and are much more resilient to drought than replanted forests. This resilience is especially important as Oregon faces hotter, drier summers, making the drought-buffering ability of old-growth forests just as valuable as their carbon storage.

A 2025 study in Science of the Total Environment found that mature and old-growth forests are better than younger forests at tackling both climate change and biodiversity loss at the same time. Plantations and second-growth timber stands cannot match these benefits.

The numbers show that cutting down old-growth trees is a bad idea. Bev Law, professor emerita at Oregon State University, told reporters that bringing BLM harvests back to 1 billion board feet a year, as the Trump administration aimed for in 2019, would be “insanity.” These forests can live for thousands of years. The carbon stored in their wood and soil stays out of the atmosphere and keeps building up over time.

Oregon Becomes a Battleground

The main threat from the Administration is focused on western Oregon’s O&C Lands. These lands, once granted to the Oregon and California Railroad, were returned to federal ownership in 1916 and now cover about 2.5 million acres across 17 counties managed by the BLM. In the 1960s, annual timber harvests often topped 1 billion board feet, reaching a peak of 1.638 billion in 1964. Harvests dropped sharply in the 1990s after the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet were listed as threatened, and the Northwest Forest Plan shifted management toward conservation.

In February 2026, Trump’s BLM announced plans to revise management for these lands, aiming to bring timber production back to pre-1990 clear-cutting levels. The proposal covers all 2.5 million acres across 17 counties, including well-known areas such as the Sandy River watershed, North Fork Clackamas, the Valley of the Giants, the Upper Molalla River, and Alsea Falls. Since 2000, harvests have ranged from 45 to 275 million board feet per year. The new plan would raise that to 1 billion board feet.

The public comment period closed March 23, 2026; a record of decision is tentatively scheduled for February 12, 2027. That timeline could outlast the current administration, but the proposal, once formally proposed, would constrain future management options.  The idea is to strip away environmental protections for salmon and drinking water and fire and fuels to maximize timber extraction across public lands in western Oregon, said George Sexton, conservation director for KS Wild.

The Roadless Rule and the Bigger Picture

The BLM proposal is part of a larger rollback. In August 2025, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration plans to end the 2001 Roadless Rule. This Clinton-era rule bans road building, logging, and mining on about 58 million acres of federal forest land, including 2 million acres in Oregon. Rollins described the rule as burdensome, outdated, and one-size-fits-all.

Environmental groups immediately promised litigation. “If the Trump administration actually revokes the roadless rule, we will see them in court,” said  Earthjustice attorney Drew Caputo. Oregon Rep. Andrea Salinas introduced the Roadless Area Conservation Act in June 2025 to codify the rule into law, drawing nearly 50 House cosponsors.

In early 2025, Trump signed two executive orders telling agencies to speed up timber sales and avoid environmental reviews for more than 400 threatened and endangered species, such as wild salmon, marbled murrelets, and spotted owls. A Republican budget bill passed in the Senate also required the Forest Service to increase timber production by at least 250 million board feet each year and to sign 20-year logging contracts, regardless of the environmental impact.

Worth More Standing

There is a real economic case for logging, but it has limits. Many Oregon counties have struggled financially since logging declined in the 1990s, and timber revenue is important for rural budgets. However, industry representatives admit that most mills can no longer handle large old-growth logs. Technology now focuses on smaller and medium-sized wood, according to Amanda Sullivan-Astor of the Associated Oregon Loggers. The economic setup for harvesting old-growth trees is missing, even before considering legal challenges that could delay any plans for years.

The value of old-growth forests goes far beyond timber, and this is not reflected in timber prices. These forests support a huge variety of life, including not just spotted owls and murrelets, but also salmon, elk, bears, rare fungi, and plants that cannot survive even in plantations of the same species. Old-growth forests help manage water, protect drinking supplies, prevent erosion and landslides, and shield nearby communities from wildfires. This is the opposite of what the BLM claims clearcutting would do. In fact, the BLM’s own research has shown that clearcutting old-growth rainforests actually increases fire risk.

The fungal networks under the forest floor are getting more attention from scientists and in popular books. These networks add another layer of complexity that cannot be replaced. Scientists are still learning how trees use these fungal connections to share nutrients and chemical signals over many years. These systems take centuries to form and cannot be recreated in plantations.

Any unknown benefits that old-growth forests might offer will be lost forever, all for about $1,000 per centuries-old tree, the current price for old-growth timber.

What You Can Do

The BLM’s process for revising O&C Lands management is still ongoing. Although the public comment period ended in March 2026, the Environmental Impact Statement process is still underway, and legal challenges are almost certain. Here are some ways you can stay involved:

• Follow Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands, and Earthjustice for updates on litigation and comment opportunities.
• Contact your federal representatives about the Roadless Area Conservation Act and urge them to cosponsor legislation making the Roadless Rule permanent law.
• Support the Old-Growth Forest Network, which works to designate protected native forests in every county in the U.S.
• Visit and spend time in public lands. Your presence and spending as a visitor help show the value of forests beyond timber, which is important for land use planning.
• If you live in a county with O&C Lands, go to local commissioner meetings where timber revenue is being discussed. While logging does bring in money, there are also strong financial reasons to keep forests intact, protect clean water, and support outdoor tourism.

Related Reading

Ecosystem Services: Nature’s Gifts That Help Us Thrive

Restore Our Earth With Reforestation

Native Wisdom in Land Management

Biochar Was a Billion-Ton Dream. The Reality Is More Complicated.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Gemma Alexander on August 9, 2021, and was substantively updated in April 2026.

The post Worth More Standing — The Value of Old-Growth Forests appeared first on Earth911.

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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on February 9, 2026.

Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

We’re going to talk about ocean plastics. Every year, more than 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean. That’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck worth of plastic every minute. And we’ve known for decades that marine animals eat this debris. But until recently, no one had systematically quantified how much plastic it actually takes to kill them.

And the answer is, it turns out, disturbing. Less than three sugar cubes worth of plastic increases an Atlantic puffin’s risk of dying by 90%. A loggerhead turtle reaches the same threshold at about two baseballs worth, and for a harbor porpoise, a mass of plastic roughly the size of a soccer ball can kill. More concerning, at the 50% mortality level — that is, where half the animals who consume the plastic die — the volumes that kill them shrink to less than one sugar cube for a puffin and half a baseball for a loggerhead turtle.

Our guest today, Dr. Erin Murphy, is the manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and lead author of the study that produced these findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her team’s research analyzed more than 10,000 necroscopies across 95 species of seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals worldwide. It’s the most comprehensive assessment yet of how different plastic types — soft film like bags, hard fragments, synthetic rubber from balloons, and abandoned fishing gear — translate into mortality across marine life.

The findings matter beyond ocean conservation. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found microplastics embedded in human arterial plaque of cardiovascular surgery patients, and those with detectable plastics were 4.5 times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or death in the following three years. The same polymers killing seabirds and sea turtles — polyethylene, PVC, and their chemical additives — are found in human blood, lungs, liver, and placenta.

Dr. Murphy’s research offers policymakers what they’ve been asking for: science-based data to inform decisions about which plastics to regulate and how aggressively to act. Nearly half the animals in her study that had ingested plastics were threatened or endangered species, and with global negotiations on a binding plastic treaty continuing and extended producer responsibility programs expanding across the United States, the timing of this research could not be more relevant.

So we’ll talk with Erin about what her team found, why balloon fragments are amongst the deadliest items for seabirds, how fishing gear became the leading killer of marine animals, and what her research means for the humans who share a planet and a body burden with these species. You can read the full study at pnas.org and find Ocean Conservancy’s work at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.

So how much plastic is too much for wildlife and for humans? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Erin. How you doing today?

Erin Murphy  3:44

I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:46

Well, thank you for joining me, and for this really important research. It was a fascinating read. We wrote it up, and I’m really pleased that you would join us to talk about it today. So can you explain what made this study different from previous attempts to quantify plastics’ lethality to marine life?

Erin Murphy  4:01

Yeah. So first, I’ll specify that we focus specifically on macroplastics, which are just plastics that are bigger than five millimeters in length. There’s more research on how microplastics, which are these smaller plastics, can harm animals, because scientists can study these in laboratory settings. Of course, it’s not feasible or ethical to feed animals like whales, sea turtles, or seabirds large plastic items and study what happens to them in the lab. And so as scientists, we really have to depend on opportunistically collecting dead animals in the environment and looking at what’s inside them to understand what’s happening with these bigger plastics.

And so previous research has looked at these sorts of threats as well, but they focused on fewer species, on smaller geographic areas, and they didn’t differentiate by plastic type, like hard plastics versus soft plastics. So they were really important for laying the groundwork for our larger study. But we were actually able to look globally and look at a broader set of species, and also differentiate by these different plastic types and by species size as well, which allowed us to get at some of these species-level understandings.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:13

So the unfortunate truth is, we are feeding these animals this material by throwing it all away. That is a stark way of starting this conversation. And you use a lot of illustrative examples, like three sugar cubes worth of macroplastic can kill a puffin. How did you arrive at those kind of volume-based comparisons, and why is translating your data into those relatable measures important?

Erin Murphy  5:37

Yeah, so when we did this in the study, we actually looked at the influence of volume based on the animal’s body length. So we reported all of this as a deadly volume per centimeter of body length. But telling people 0.098 centimeters cubed per centimeter doesn’t really mean anything to them. And honestly, when I first got those centimeter-based thresholds, it didn’t mean that much to me.

And so we thought that choosing some iconic species that people could picture would help, but still saying, you know, three centimeters cubed of plastic kills a puffin, or 220 centimeters cubed of plastic kills a loggerhead, doesn’t really paint a picture in people’s heads, and three sugar cubes or a baseball are much easier to picture.

So we chose to do this because I think when people can picture these items, they can really understand that volume, and people do use plastic every single day, and so having volumes like that to compare to allows them to think about how little plastic can kill animals, especially when we compare it to how much we produce or use globally.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:42

Can you put in context how long it takes for a puffin, for instance, to eat that much plastic? What do they eat in a day or a week generally?

Erin Murphy  6:52

Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s actually the next step in our research. So to estimate the risk that something poses to wildlife, we have to understand two things. One is your question: how likely are they to be exposed to this threat? The second is, if they are exposed to it, how likely is it to harm them? And so this research really focused entirely on that second piece.

But to fully understand risk, we have to dig deeper into the first part, and that’s what we call likelihood of exposure. And so for puffins specifically, there’s not a lot of research, but we do know a lot about what species are eating, and we know that different species are more or less likely to eat plastic based on where they live, what they eat, and how they feed. So we’re really excited to be working with some really amazing researchers over the next few years to think about how we can connect exposure for these animals to the lethality and understand risk in a more comprehensive way.

Mitch Ratcliffe  7:48

I want to get a sense of what you found. You mentioned in the study that one whale can have a three-gallon bucket in its stomach. What’s the range of objects that you encountered as you were doing the research?

Erin Murphy  8:00

Yeah, this was pretty unbelievable to me, actually, some of the things that we saw in animals, and I’ll just give a few items that stood out to me. But there’s many more. Part of an oar handle from a plastic — or a plastic belt, webbing from the back of a lawn chair, a koozie, rubber pencil topper, fake Easter grass, ice cream tubs, single-use coffee pods, bungee cords, tons of different types of gear, ropes, nets, fishing line.

But I’ll just illustrate kind of how dramatic this can look with one example that really stood out to me, on a sperm whale that researchers in Spain reported on. Sperm whales feed very deep in the ocean, and they use echolocation to find their food. So it may be particularly hard for them to tell plastic from prey. And in this case, it seems like an entire greenhouse washed into the ocean, and this sperm whale happened upon it. It had plastic film cover material for a greenhouse in its stomach, along with a flower pot, a piece of a hose, a plastic burlap sack, plastic craft, and plastic spray bottle, and even fake plastic mulch in its stomach. And unfortunately, this was one of the individuals that did lose its life to plastic ingestion.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:23

That’s — I mean, that’s shocking in so many ways. You found that one in five animals had plastic in their digestive tract when they died. Was this percentage higher or lower, and in the context of your previous answer, more or less shocking than you expected?

Erin Murphy  9:45

Yeah, I think, you know, it was higher than I expected. And it’s funny, because all of our research was based on previous research. It was a meta-analysis. So we collected data from existing literature. And I’d seen some, you know, similar numbers then reported at more local scales. But I think it still really shocked me to look at so many studies and see, you know, for sea turtles, that was one in two. Sea turtles had plastic in their gut. And for seabirds, one in three.

And when thinking about that at a global scale, that felt higher to me than it should be, and I suppose it’s because it is higher than it should be. These really are high ingestion rates. And for some of these individuals, the bulk amount of plastic in their gut, like that sperm whale, is particularly shocking.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:35

I want to step back just for a second and talk about how long this kind of research has been going on. Because when I was a child, oceanography was very much in its infancy. How aggressively are we trying to understand what we’re doing to the ocean environment at this point, and where do you think we are in terms of the long arc of beginning to reach that understanding?

Erin Murphy  10:58

Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever fully understand it, which is one of the things that makes studying the ocean so interesting. It’s so complex and vast. But, you know, we’ve come a long way, and for plastic pollution in particular, the ’70s was really when we started seeing those first reports of animals eating plastics. You know, and it’s been 50 years since then. Now we have evidence of plastic ingestion in more than 1,300 species, and we’re starting to be able to get at these really more complicated analyses that help us understand like the potential quantity that kills an animal, like this one, or what does that mean possibly for populations.

I think the thing that’s been really impressive in the last decade, though, is how much research has been done on plastics. In particular, 10 years ago, roughly, the first study came out by Jambeck et al. that gave us an idea of the amount of plastic that was getting into the environment. And since then, we have learned so much as a scientific community, and people are working really hard to try to understand what these vast amounts of ocean plastic mean for ecosystems, for human health, for fishing industries and other marine industries that really depend on a healthy ocean, and we’ve been doing a lot of research on how to address it. So I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand everything that we’re doing to the ocean, but I think we’re working hard as a scientific community to get there.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:38

It’s really disturbing to think about, because plastic in the 1970s was really only — was 10 years into widespread use, and widespread compared to today is nothing, since half the plastic we’ve manufactured in history has been made since 2002. So it sounds like what we’re really delving into now is a real-time accounting of the damage that we’re doing. How do you as a scientist think about what your goal is in terms of bringing the consequences of our decisions back to the public so we can think about it?

Erin Murphy  13:11

Yeah, that’s why I feel very lucky to work with an organization like Ocean Conservancy. We conduct research that we know governments and decision makers need to help address these problems, and we have a policy team and a communications team that are really well trained on helping us bring this research to the decision makers.

And the type of research we’re doing here, in particular on risk assessments, is something that governments are really craving. They want to set science-based targets as they try to address plastic pollution, and part of that is understanding environmental thresholds that we should be aiming for to better protect marine wildlife, to better protect marine ecosystems.

And so when we do research like this, a big part is getting it into the literature, in this sense to the scientific community, but it’s also working with our policy team and our communications team to make sure the public hears about it, and to make sure that decision makers nationally and abroad hear about the work that we’re doing, and can use this to help inform science-based targets that they’re setting right now.

Mitch Ratcliffe  14:22

So one of the materials that you found was most dangerous is rubber, particularly from balloons. It emerged as especially deadly for seabirds, where you estimated that just six pea-sized pieces could create a 90% mortality rate. What’s happening physiologically with balloon fragments that make them so lethal?

Erin Murphy  14:45

Yeah, so if you think about the design of a balloon, they’re super stretchy, and they’re long and they’re thin, and even the fragments seem to have this shape. And so they get stuck at those junctures in the gastrointestinal tract, like between the stomach and the intestine. And the gut moves things along through these wave-like contractions. And it seems like these stretchy materials just kind of stretch with it, and so the gut just isn’t able to move them through as easily. And we see similar things for those plastic bags as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:20

Well, you also point out that sea turtles appear to mistake plastic bags for jellyfish. Is there anything we could do in terms of the chemistry of soft plastics or the appearance of soft plastics to make them less attractive to sea life?

Erin Murphy  15:35

Yeah, I don’t know if there’s a way that we can make them less attractive that I know of. And it’s unfortunate, because we know there are a lot of plastic bags in the environment compared to other plastics. Every year, Ocean Conservancy organizes the International Coastal Cleanup, and plastic bags are consistently in the top 10 items we see most frequently.

That being said, we do know ways of keeping plastic bags out of the ocean and protecting turtles in that way. And so every year — or in this last year, during our Coastal Cleanup — we collected, or our partner organizations collected, more than 1 million bags off our beaches. So this is really important for helping protect ocean animals, because those bags are already very close to their environment, and by removing them from beaches, we prevent them from getting into the ocean.

We also know that plastic bag bans, like the policy that California just implemented, are very effective in reducing the threat that plastic bags pose to marine wildlife, and help by preventing them from getting into the environment in the first place. So there was a recent study published in Science that actually showed that communities that implement bag bans, whether that’s a city, a state, or a country, do meaningfully reduce the amount of plastic bags that end up on beaches by 25 to 47%. So that’s a really significant reduction, and just provides further evidence that we know how to address some of these threats. We have ways of measuring if policies are effective, and it’s really about preventing these bags from getting into the environment in the first place.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:18

Another example of really short-term human thinking is the impact of fishing gear pollution. Can you talk a little about what you found in terms of what’s being tossed overboard by the boats that are hoping to treat the ocean as an ongoing resource and source of living?

Erin Murphy  17:36

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the fishing gear that’s lost is lost on accident. Fishing gear can be really expensive for fishermen. Like crab pots can cost thousands of dollars. And so these are very valuable resources for fishers, and they’re expensive to replace.

But unfortunately, one of the challenges with fishing in turbid and wavy environments around storms, especially with things that are set, is that some gear does get lost. And we did see interactions and ingestion of fishing gear by many of these animals. And partially that’s because gear attracts prey species. So we know that for some animals, they’re more likely to interact with fishing gear, and this isn’t just ingestion, but also being entangled in fishing gear, because, you know, that gear is still fishing. And for a lot of these bigger species, fish are their prey, and so they’re also being drawn to these devices, or this lost gear that might have their food in it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:44

And your study didn’t look at the external plastic lethality, it was only that which was consumed. So we don’t really fully understand what the consequences of, say, for instance, a net lost at sea is for the ocean yet? Or do we?

Erin Murphy  19:01

Yeah, we have — there’s some studies that have looked at this, but this is actually another study we’re working on. So one of the next papers we’re working on right now is looking at entanglement lethality, and that really will be important for understanding the impacts of plastic pollution together, because ingestion and entanglement, when we talk about these bigger plastics, are the two main threats that we see.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:24

I feel like we’ve got our bearings and can have a really productive conversation. But folks, we’re going to take a quick commercial break. We’ll be right back.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s get back to my discussion with the Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy, who led a groundbreaking study about the lethal effects of macroplastics in sea life. Erin, nearly half the animals that you studied that had ingested plastics were already listed as threatened. Is plastic pollution accelerating extinction risk, and what species do you feel are most endangered?

Erin Murphy  20:03

Yeah, that’s a great question. Right now, there’s not a lot of research yet on population-level effects of plastic pollution, and our study is really helping build that information out. But it’s just very difficult to understand what’s happening to populations that often we have trouble studying in the first place.

Still, for many marine species, the IUCN Red List notes plastic pollution as a significant threat. Six out of seven sea turtle species are threatened. We saw really high ingestion rates for sea turtles. We know that 5% of the turtles in our data set died from plastic ingestion.

So I think there is a lot of evidence suggesting that this could be contributing to extinction risk. And there are some studies that look at very specific populations that we know are vulnerable, like the Hawaiian monk seal, that have found that plastic pollution is contributing to extinction risk.

And the hopeful piece in the Hawaiian monk seal case was actually that as communities started doing large-scale cleanup efforts in the Hawaiian Islands, they actually saw a rebound of that population. So again, just a reminder that even though we know that this is something that is posing a threat to marine species we really care about, it’s also evidence that targeted and effective intervention strategies can be really important in helping some of these species rebound.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:34

That’s encouraging. So it isn’t as though we’re doomed, or that nature is doomed. We can intervene in our behavior today and make a change for the better in the future. How does the Ocean Conservancy encourage people to do that?

Erin Murphy  21:49

Yeah, so there was a study that we — some of us co-authored, and the Ocean Conservancy supported — that came out in 2020 that looked at what we would really need to do on a global scale to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean meaningfully enough to hit some of our potential targets. And in this case, we were thinking about just returning to 2010 annual leakage rates into the environment.

And what we found is that we really need sweeping change to our relationship with plastic and our waste management systems. And so we found that to achieve this goal, we would need a 40% reduction in plastic production globally. We would need waste management to reach levels of 98 to 99%, depending on the income of the country. And we would need, annually, 40% of waste that gets into the environment to then be cleaned up.

And at Ocean Conservancy, we really work on policy efforts in all three of those big buckets. And so we have the International Coastal Cleanup, but we also work on upstream policies with our policy teams at the sub-national, national, and international levels to try to work towards some of those goals of reducing plastic production and better managing the plastic waste that we do use.

Mitch Ratcliffe  23:10

You used the phrase “our relationship with plastic,” which is an interesting concept. In 2024, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that microplastics were found in human arterial plaque, and that resulted in much higher risk for cardiovascular events. Do you see what you’re studying as a parallel crisis, or the same crisis, just in a different species?

Erin Murphy  23:35

Yeah, I view that — you know, so they were looking specifically at microplastics, and we focused on macroplastics in this study. That being said, most microplastics that are in the environment are breaking off of these larger macroplastics. So in that sense, I do view this all as part of the same crisis, and I think we need to think about all of the harms that plastic materials are causing to human health, to animal health, and to sociocultural outcomes like our marine and terrestrial industries that are affected by plastic pollution, and we need to think about comprehensive policies that are addressing all of those harms.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:17

Are there studies that are showing the same types of impacts from plastic in human and non-human species that we can use to start to tell the story in that same illustrative way that you did with the sugar cube analogy, so that people really take this seriously? I mean, the problem with our society is that we’re accustomed to throwing everything away.

Erin Murphy  24:40

Yeah, so there’s a lot of really great research that’s being done on microplastic exposure in other marine and aquatic organisms, and those are more similar to what’s happening in humans. But that human research, and the research on sort of sub-lethal microplastic risks — like the risks to cardiovascular systems, nervous system, gastrointestinal tracts — those are all pretty new, and so this body of research is really building, and I think we’re going to learn a lot in the next decade.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:14

Do you see an acceleration of your ability to make those kinds of conclusions — well-grounded conclusions — emerging as a result of the advent of something like artificial intelligence? Are we at the dawn of a scientific revolution?

Erin Murphy  25:33

You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know in what ways AI will change the way that we’re doing research. Definitely, the rate at which we are producing research has increased. There’s more people working on these issues, and the scientific process is really just about iterating as a community and building on what we know. And so I think what we’re seeing here is a large-scale interest in this plastics issue and a big concern by the scientific community and by the public.

And as we learn more, we can answer more complicated questions. And so I was only able to do my work because over the last five decades, people have been studying what plastic is in the animals and reporting on that, and we have thousands of published papers now that tell us about what animals are consuming. And each one of those papers is really important in producing this bigger picture. And as we have, you know, similarly more studies on these sort of individual systems and humans, using model organisms like mice, we will be able to do the same sort of thing of painting this bigger picture for humans as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:48

So as we get this higher-resolution view of what we’re doing, both to the planet and to ourselves, how does Ocean Conservancy potentially use those storytelling opportunities to get us to think about things like plastic bans, or the impact of extended producer responsibility on not just what ends up in the environment, but what we design so that it doesn’t end up in the environment in the future? It’s a big, complicated, multifaceted story. Where are we going?

Erin Murphy  27:17

Yeah, that is true, and I am not the policy expert at Ocean Conservancy, but the work that they do is amazing. And they, you know, they go and they talk to the public about these issues and educate the public through blogs and other resources to make sure that people understand the scale of the problem. And they work really closely with local decision makers who are interested in addressing these problems and help them develop bills, help them build support for bills. And, you know, we’ll meet with legislators and other leaders to help them kind of understand the reason that these policies are useful.

So Ocean Conservancy in the last 10 years has done a lot of work on state bills, like helping to push forward California’s SB 54, or specific bills that are targeting problematic plastics. Like recently, Florida passed a balloon release ban. Ocean Conservancy was also really involved in pushing that.

And I think we have seen with plastic pollution — what, for me, one of the things that’s most comforting in studying plastic pollution is actually that people do really seem to care about this issue and do seem willing to make change. So when people find out what I research — strangers — they always tell me about what they’re doing to reduce their plastic footprint, and I think that’s just a sign that there is appetite for change, and people want to understand how to do it. And as an organization, we’re just trying to leverage that passion and that stewardship that does kind of inherently exist in people, especially when they see the plastics that they’re using, and use that and sound science to help develop policies that can actually make a change on this issue.

Mitch Ratcliffe  29:06

Building on what you mentioned a moment ago, based on your findings about which plastics are the most lethal, it sounds like it’s a blend. But should policymakers prioritize specific materials, or just look at broad categories? No more of this type.

Erin Murphy  29:23

I think we need to do both. So we did find that different plastics pose different levels of risk, and I think there’s policies that are smaller and easier to implement, like balloon release bans and bag bans, that are effective in targeting some of these problematic plastics specifically. You know, using that Hawaiian monk seal example as well, having very targeted and strategic cleanups can be really important for protecting animals at sea turtle nesting beaches or seabird nesting areas. There’s these areas that we know are of particular importance for animals.

But still, the total plastic thresholds that we found were also low, and we see all types of plastics in these animals. So at the end of the day, there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we do need sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal, to meaningfully address this issue and protect our oceans.

And it takes longer to implement these policies because it does require some pretty extensive system-wide changes. But I think policies like California’s SB 54, which aims to reduce 25% of single-use plastics used, that’s really a step in the right direction. And so our policy team is on the front lines of making sure that that bill is fully implemented and that we understand the benefits of that policy by monitoring outcomes and effectiveness of it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:56

You mentioned earlier that on the International Coastal Cleanup Day, which is a distributed event all over the world but a day, they collected more than a million plastic bags last year. Is the goal in the long term to no longer need to do those cleanups? Or do you anticipate that we’re always going to be needing to do those cleanups?

Erin Murphy  31:18

Yeah, I think unfortunately, at this point, it’s hard to imagine a world where cleanups aren’t necessary. I think when we did that study in 2020, that was led by Lau et al., it was pretty alarming to see how much we would have to reduce plastic production and how well we would have to manage waste to no longer need cleanups at all, and we really did find that cleanups needed to be an important part of this solution.

And there’s already a lot of legacy plastics in the ocean. So I think as far as we can look forward, cleanups will always be an important part of the suite of solutions that we use.

They’re also really effective for monitoring what’s happening in our ocean. So I mentioned earlier that study that was published in Science that showed that plastic bag bans are effective. We were really excited to see that they actually used Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup data to do that analysis, and it really just emphasizes the value of citizen science. When you go out and collect data during a cleanup on your beach, we can see what changes occur through time in terms of what debris you’re seeing, and that helps us better understand whether it’s targeted policies or these broader policies, if they’re being effective or not.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:42

What does the Ocean Conservancy do to help people do citizen science beyond the International Coastal Cleanup?

Erin Murphy  32:49

So that program has been going on for 40 years, and that’s really, in terms of citizen science, our main body of work. But we are interested in having citizens engage in other ways. So we often have — you can sign up for our newsletter and get information about opportunities to call your senators or write your senators or legislators about important ocean issues that are coming up.

And we also just have a lot of educational material so that people can start their own cleanup events, or find cleanup events to participate in, so that individuals can be engaged in being part of the solution.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:31

You’ve mentioned a couple of items of research that you are beginning to pursue now. But if you had unlimited resources for the remainder of your career, what would you like to investigate and build on those findings with?

Erin Murphy  33:44

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to imagine unlimited resources, especially now, I know. But yeah, you know, we already started working on answering some of these next questions that are remaining for us, and I’m really excited about the work that we’re going to be doing over the next three to five years. And I will not be surprised if, you know, this body of work, trying to understand what’s happening to ocean animals, becomes a career-long question for me.

But in the short term, the things we’re really trying to get at is, first, that entanglement piece, which you mentioned — what is the lethality of plastic entanglement. And we also just launched a working group with scientists from all over the world to take what we have learned about the lethality of plastic ingestion and to build out, include what we are learning right now in our research about entanglement, and then bring in that exposure piece.

So that question you asked earlier about how much plastic is a puffin eating, how often does it have a lethal dose — that’s really what we want to get at. We want to know if we have an idea of what’s in the environment, how likely is that to have population-level effects for species? How likely are they to eat a lethal dose? How likely are they to die? And are we worried about populations because of this?

And right now, governments around the world are really trying to determine how to effectively address plastic pollution, and these sorts of comprehensive risk assessments are really helpful in setting targets. And so that’s really what I want to keep getting at: How can we take everything we know and help decision makers better understand, you know, a reasonable goal? Because a perfect goal is an ocean with no plastic, and I think we have to keep working towards that collectively. But it’s also really important to understand what species are being adversely affected and what we can do to immediately protect them now.

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:46

Well, it’s a multi-generational challenge, and I really applaud the work that you’re doing. How can folks keep up with the work that you’re undertaking?

Erin Murphy  35:55

Yeah, we have a brand new website at oceanconservancy.org, and we have a lot of information there, you know, specifically on what our plastics team is doing, but on what our entire organization is doing in terms of bills that we’re working on. They can also sign up for our newsletter to get information about what the organization is working on, and that will give them ample opportunities to participate in being part of the solution to the plastics crisis.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:20

Erin, thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fascinating conversation and an encouraging one.

Erin Murphy  36:26

Thank you. It was great to be here.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:34

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Dr. Erin Murphy, manager of ocean plastics research at the Ocean Conservancy, and she’s the lead author of the recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that quantifies, for the first time at this scale, how much plastic it takes to kill seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals.

You can explore the Ocean Conservancy’s wide-ranging work and sign up for a beach cleanup event at oceanconservancy.org. Ocean Conservancy is all one word, no space, no dash. Oceanconservancy.org.

The numbers Erin and her colleagues reported should stop us in our tracks. The volumes we heard about are disturbing, but imagine — one in five animals had plastic in their gut when they died. For sea turtles, it was one in two. What makes that study especially useful for policymakers is its differentiation by plastic type. Rubber fragments can be targeted because balloons are the deadliest material for seabirds. Soft plastics like bags are the top killer for sea turtles. Ghost fishing gear poses the greatest risk to marine mammals like whales. And each of these findings points to a specific, actionable policy lever: balloon release bans like Florida’s recent legislation, bag bans like California’s, and better gear-marking and recovery programs for the fishing industry.

But the targeted approach is only part of the answer. As Erin emphasized, the total plastic thresholds her team found were low across the board, meaning that every type of plastic poses a threat. “At the end of the day,” she said, “there is too much plastic in the ocean, and we need to do sweeping reforms along the entire plastics life cycle, from production to management to disposal.” That’s a very important quote. Keep it in mind.

A 2020 Ocean Conservancy-backed study quantified what “sweeping” means: a 40% reduction in global plastic production, waste management reaching 98 to 99% effectiveness in its collection and processing of plastic so it doesn’t reach nature, and annual cleanups of the 40% of plastic that still escapes into the environment — and that’s just to return to the 2010 leakage rates.

So that brings us to the elephant in the room — or maybe more to the point, the sperm whale with an entire greenhouse in its stomach — the global plastics treaty negotiations. Which were supposed to deliver a binding international agreement, collapsed in August 2025 in Geneva after oil-producing nations blocked provisions that called for production caps and toxic chemical phase-outs. More than 100 countries in the group known as the High Ambition Coalition were pushing for full life-cycle regulation for plastics, but the requirement that the negotiations reach a consensus gave a handful of petrochemical states an effective veto power. And effective it was.

So between the Busan round in late 2024 and the end of the Geneva talks in 2025, an estimated 7.4 million more metric tons of plastic entered the ocean. The world currently produces more than 460 million metric tons of plastic annually, and only 9% of that is being recycled. Every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks of plastic is dumped into our oceans, rivers, and lakes.

However, the collapse of the treaty talks does not mean the end of progress. Erin pointed to evidence that targeted interventions can work. For example, communities in Hawaii conducted large beach cleanups and saw the Hawaiian monk seal population rebound. A study published in Science confirms that bag bans reduce plastic on beaches by between 25 and 47%. California’s SB 54 law aims to cut single-use plastics by 25%. And Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, which is now in its 40th year, removed more than a million plastic bags from beaches last year. That cleanup data, collected by citizen scientists worldwide, is a research tool providing the time-series evidence that tells us whether policies are working.

So here’s what I want you to leave with from this conversation. Erin’s research focuses exclusively on acute mortality from ingested macroplastics — that’s obstruction, perforation, and torsion of the digestive tract. It does not capture the chronic effects of plastic and chemical exposure or entanglement, which her team will study next. That means the lethal thresholds that she reported likely underestimate the total harm plastic inflicts on marine life.

And the parallel crisis in human health is building from the same source of pollution, which has scattered microscopic shards of plastic across the planet, from the seas to the highest peaks. Most of these microplastics began as macroplastics, like those that are killing puffins and turtles. They break down in the environment into fragments small enough to enter our bloodstream, lungs, liver, and even women’s placentas. As Erin put it, it is all a part of the same crisis.

So one of the most encouraging things that Erin said was also the simplest. When strangers learn about what she studies, they stop and they tell her what they are doing to reduce their plastic footprint. That instinct to environmental stewardship is a real and powerful phenomenon, even if it’s currently being actively suppressed by governments. And the public’s will to protect nature is the foundation that policy, science, and investment will ultimately build on.

The ocean doesn’t need our sympathy. It needs a 40% cut in plastic production, waste systems that actually work, and the political will to treat a binding plastics agreement as a matter of human survival rather than an inconvenience for a few petrochemical companies. Until international negotiations deliver that agreement, the work continues at every other level: state legislatures, coastal cleanups, citizen science, and research programs like Erin’s that give decision makers the evidence-based targets that they’ve been asking for.

So stay tuned, folks, for more conversations about the solutions that can still turn this crisis around. And I hope you’ll take a moment to take a look at any of the more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear in our archives. Take the time to share just one of them with your friends or your family. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family, and co-workers they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

Thank you all for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet and its oceans. Have a green day.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: The Ocean Conservancy’s Dr. Erin Murphy Documents the Lethality of Ocean Plastics appeared first on Earth911.

In March 2026, the Arctic’s winter sea ice reached one of the lowest levels ever recorded, at 5.52 million square miles, about 10% below the 30-year average. This was 10,000 square miles less than the 5.53 million square miles measured in 2025. The Arctic winter sea ice covered 5.56 million square miles in 2017 and 5.79 million square miles in 2020, and has been declining since then.

Less white ice means more dark ocean water, and dark water absorbs heat rather than reflecting it, speeding up warming, or so we are told. Yet, any helmsman will attest that the ocean is never truly black, except on a moonless night. Light reflects off the sea as brightly as the sky. A cloud-covered sky lowers the reflection, turning the ocean gunmetal gray.

Science is a cycle of observing, questioning, recording, and sharing. Imagine practicing science with a pair of pint glasses on a sunny day. Fill one glass with cold black coffee and the other with cold white milk. Place a thermometer in each and observe what happens over time.

Both the pint of coffee and the pint of milk will reach the same temperature as the air. The heating occurs through conduction, with the glass in contact with the air. Unlike a black car seat, water molecules are free to move. The chaotic motion of warming water molecules makes it impossible to heat water in a glass or coffee in a mug above room temperature with a hair dryer. Dark waters are not warmed by sunlight and so are not responsible for melting sea ice. Waters are warmed by contact with warmer surfaces, like when a coffee pot is placed on the stove.

The Arctic Ocean connects to the Atlantic Ocean via the Greenland Sea, which is part of the Atlantic. The Svalbard Archipelago is on the threshold between the two oceans. To the east of Svalbard is the Barents Sea. Covering about 540,000 square miles, the Barents Sea is north of Norway and Russia and west of Franz Josef Land. On the continental shelf, it is relatively shallow, with an average depth of about 750 feet.  The average depth of the Arctic Sea to the North is about 3,900 feet.

The Arctic isn’t melting uniformly like a spring pond. Melting starts with warm Atlantic Gulf Stream water. Nearly all the Arctic Sea ice loss, totaling 525,000 square miles, happens in the Barents Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean. This occurs because of the Coriolis Effect, a phenomenon caused by the Earth’s eastward rotation. The equator moves faster through space than the North Pole. As a result, water flowing north curves to the right. When it enters the Arctic, warm Atlantic water flows directly into the Barents Sea.

In April 1810, the whaler William Scoresby lowered a ten-gallon wooden cask made of fir into the deep after overwintering in the Greenland Sea west of Svalbard. This design was by Joseph Banks, the scientist on Cook’s expedition. Fir was the preferred wood because it is a softwood that insulates better than harder woods. Scoresby was surprised to find that the Gulf Stream water at 100 to 200 fathoms deep was six to eight degrees warmer than the Arctic water above. He didn’t believe it at first and modified the cask to record the temperature more quickly. However, the results were consistent. The Gulf Stream was flowing into the Arctic Ocean, separated from the sea ice by a layer of less salty, denser Arctic water.

Besides discovering changes occurring in the Greenland Sea, Scoresby observed, “changes of climate to a certain extent, have occurred, …, considered as the effects of human industry, in draining marshes and lakes, felling woods, and cultivating the earth” (Scoresby 1821, page 263).

Over time, the loss of vegetation and soils, replaced by hard surfaces that have become heat islands, has resulted in more and warmer stormwater runoff into the Atlantic. This happened without a change in annual rainfall. More water strengthens the Gulf Stream, and as temperatures rise, the expanded water has moved closer to the surface in the Arctic.

In 2007, the Gulf Stream surfaced in Svalbard, and warm water began melting glaciers on land.

During the winter of 2010-2011, the Gulf Stream was observed to have a more pronounced meander onto the Continental Shelf closer to Rhode Island than ever before. This indicates a need for a strengthened Gulf Stream to dissipate more energy.

The Gulf Stream flows past New Jersey at 30 to 40 Sverdrups, or 30 to 40 million cubic meters per second, with a seasonal variation of 5-15%. Maximum flow usually occurs in late summer to early fall. It gathers water as it barrels northward. The Gulf Stream transports more than 100 Sverdrups east of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland,

Only 2-3% of the total Gulf Stream flow is carried by the Norway Current into the Barents Sea, but it punches far above its weight in terms of climate impact in the Arctic Ocean.

Atlantification is the process by which warm Atlantic water melts Arctic sea ice. This leads to thinner winter sea ice that melts faster in summer. NASA imagery shows the Siberian coast from Norway to Alaska opening nearly simultaneously. The counter-clockwise gyre created by Atlantic water entering the Arctic pushes ice against Canada and Northern Greenland.

Rounding Greenland, the Arctic Ocean current flows south along Greenland and into the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland.  Here, the cold, nutrient-rich Arctic water meets warm, nutrient-poor Atlantic water and plunges 11,500 feet down.  The Earth’s largest waterfall, three times taller than Angel Falls, is underwater.

The East Greenland Current will become the Labrador Current after rounding Greenland, carrying oxygen-rich and nutrient-rich waters into the Atlantic. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland will force Arctic waters to mix with warm, salty water, creating arguably the world’s most productive fishing region.

The Northeast Passage, the Arctic Ocean sea route from the Atlantic along the coast of Siberia to the Pacific, opened in the early 2000s.  In 2007, the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago opened to shipping.  The close timing of the two passages’ openings was a surprise, given our understanding of oceanography.  However, solar radiation off the granites and gneiss (igneous and metamorphic) rocks of the Canadian Shield made the difference for a region where warm Atlantic water could not reach.

We need to reduce surface runoff by increasing vegetation cover and soil depth to help water stay on the land where it falls, while restoring the Arctic’s winter sea ice and cooling the climate. Additionally, we should naturally lessen the heat island effects of our structures by providing more shade and transpiration cooling from plants. Slowing down water flow during times of abundance to ensure it is available where and when nature needs it will lower seasonal ocean warming.

There are immediate benefits to having more water on land, such as more greenery, less warming, and decreased ocean swelling. The advantages for land, water, and sky are vast and difficult to fully understand. Still, the benefits of restoring Arctic sea ice are clear and serve as a clarion call for responsible local actions by all property owners, no matter where they are in the watershed we call Earth.

About the Author

Dr. Rob Moir is a nationally recognized and award-winning environmentalist. He is the president and executive director of the Ocean River Institute, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, MA, that provides expertise, services, resources, and information not readily available locally to support the efforts of environmental organizations. Please visit www.oceanriver.org for more information.

The post Guest Idea: Stormwater Runoff into the Atlantic and the Atlantification of the Arctic appeared first on Earth911.

Fifty-seven countries representing roughly a third of the global economy walked into a coal port and agreed it was time to leave coal, oil, and gas behind. This is not the beginning of a joke. They did it without the United States, China, India, Russia, or Saudi Arabia in the room; and that was the point.

The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands in Santa Marta, Colombia, from April 24 to 29, was conceived as an end-run petrostates that have stalled U.N. climate talks for three decades. It opened against the backdrop of the Iran war, the largest oil supply disruption in history, and a growing sense in capitals from Manila to Madrid that fossil fuel dependence is no longer just a climate problem, it is a national security concern.

Whether Santa Marta marks a genuine inflection point or another diplomatic detour will depend on what the participating governments do in the next 18 months. But the debate has shifted, and that matters to the climate and U.S. energy policy.

A Coalition of the Willing, Sitting in a Circle

The Santa Marta format was deliberately unlike a United Nations Conference of Parties, or COP. Instead of plenary speeches and bracketed text, ministers and envoys sat in small circles, discussing issues with civil society and Indigenous representatives in the room. Officials, according to Carbon Brief’s on-site reporting, described the conversations as “refreshing,” “highly successful,” and “groundbreaking.”

The guest list was as much a statement as the agenda. Colombia and the Netherlands invited countries that had backed a roadmap for a fossil fuel phase-out at COP30 in Belém last year. China, India, Russia, the United States, and the Gulf states were not on the list. Co-host Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister, told reporters the goal was to avoid “a rehashing” of Belém and to gather a “coalition of the willing.” Among those willing were several major fossil fuel producers, including Australia, Norway, Canada, Colombia itself, and Nigeria, which acknowledged the contradictions in their own economies but committed to the conversation.

Panama’s special climate representative, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, speaking at the opening plenary, captured the mood: “For 34 years, we have negotiated the symptoms of the climate crisis and bulletproofed its cause. Thirty-four years of pledges. And where are we now? Economies built on fossil fuels are unraveling in real time. Fossil fuels are not just dirty. They are unreliable, they are dangerous, and they must end.”

The Iran War Changed the Game

The conference happened in the long shadow of the Iran war. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of global oil and significant LNG volumes pass, triggered what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Brent crude hit $144 per barrel earlier this spring. U.S. gasoline averaged $4.10 a gallon. The Philippines declared an energy emergency. Pakistan moved to a four-day public sector workweek to conserve fuel.

Those disruptions reframed the energy transition argument. UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte told Santa Marta delegates it “would be irresponsible to ignore the second fossil-fuel crisis in five years,” referring to the war in Ukraine and now Iran.

“Price volatility and dependence on imports are structurally and unacceptably impacting our economies,” Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven told the attendees. “We need to move away from fossil fuels not only because it is good for the climate, but because it strengthens our energy security.”

U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell made the same point earlier this spring at a meeting with the IEA in Paris, telling reporters that the war is “supercharging” the energy transition. The IEA reports that the Iran war has “thoroughly upended” the global outlook for oil consumption, with global demand now projected to contract by 80,000 barrels per day in 2026, the first annual decline since the 2020 pandemic. The IEA had projected growth of 730,000 barrels per day before the war began.

The shift is showing up in trade flows. Chinese exports of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles rose 70 percent year over year in March, according to energy think tank Ember, with EV exports up 140 percent.

“The era of fossil fuel security is over,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in a statement that week. “the era of clean energy security must come of age.”

What Santa Marta Produced

Santa Marta wasn’t a treaty negotiation, and the co-hosts were clear that it would not produce binding commitments. What it did produce was a structure for making progress. The closing plenary on April 29 announced four concrete deliverables:

• A second conference in 2027, co-hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland—an explicit pairing of a small island state and a high-income country to signal the coalition’s membership.
• A workstream to develop national fossil fuel transition roadmaps, supported by a new global science panel. France and Colombia each released their own roadmaps during the conference.
• A financial reform project focused on identifying fossil fuel subsidies and addressing the debt traps that constrain developing countries. Supported by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
• An effort to decarbonize trade, supported by the OECD, with the goal of building toward a “fossil fuel–free trade system.”

The new Science Panel for Global Energy Transition was launched at the academic pre-conference. It will be based at the University of São Paulo and will involve 50 to 100 scientists. Unlike the U.N.’s seven-year assessment cycle, the panel intends to produce annual updates and country-specific analysis on request. Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute and Carlos Nobre of the University of São Paulo, who launched it, framed the panel as deliberately independent of government line-by-line approval, which is a major change from the U.N. model.

A science pre-conference also produced a synthesis report from roughly 400 scientists with 12 “action insights,” including explicit recommendations to halt all new fossil fuel expansion and to prohibit fossil fuel advertising on the grounds that fossil fuels are health-harming products. A separate roadmap, led by Professor Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, outlined how Colombia could cut energy emissions to 90 percent below 2015 levels by 2050, with net economy-wide savings of about $23 billion annually by mid-century.

The Brazilian COP30 presidency has committed to building these inputs into an “informal” fossil fuel roadmap to be presented at COP31 in Turkey this November. That handoff is the test. Santa Marta produced a process; COP31 will reveal whether the process has political weight.

The Limits Of Cooperation

It would be easy to oversell this. Santa Marta gathered representatives of roughly a third of the global economy. The other two-thirds, including the world’s top two emitters and its largest oil producer, the United States, were absent. Tuvalu’s climate minister Maina Talia, who will co-host the 2027 conference, told Climate Home News that the criteria for invitations would have to change “If we are missing out the main players in the discussion, then we are moving in a loop, he said. “We need to find somehow how we can engage with [them], because there is no point in talking to ourselves.”

The Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative, a binding legal instrument that 18 nations have backed, did not appear in the final report. None of the workstreams has enforcement mechanisms. And the same Iran war that is accelerating renewable adoption is also being used by some governments, including the Trump administration, as justification to roll back climate policy and expand domestic fossil fuel production. Energy security can be argued in either direction. Which argument wins is a political fight, not a technical one.

Canada’s opening statement at the conference was widely noted for managing to avoid the words “fossil fuels” entirely—a reminder that even among the willing, willingness varies.

And outside the venue, Colombian mining unions protested the conference, holding signs that read “More oil, less Petro.” Colombia heads into a presidential election in late May, and President Gustavo Petro’s successor is not guaranteed. The durability of the Santa Marta process depends on a level of continuity that no single host country can guarantee.

Why It Still Matters

Santa Marta is not the moment fossil fuels ended. It is the moment a critical mass of governments stopped pretending the COP process alone could end them. That is a meaningful diplomatic shift. For three decades, the industry’s biggest structural advantage at U.N. talks has been the consensus rule: any single petrostate could block any binding language on production. Santa Marta is the first serious attempt to route around that veto.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis made it impossible for finance ministers, defense ministers, and central bankers to keep treating fossil fuel dependence as a separate file from national security. The IEA’s Fatih Birol called the situation the “greatest global energy security challenge in history.” Solar and battery costs that have fallen 80 percent and 90 percent, respectively, over the last decade made the alternative real. Santa Marta gave that combination a forum.

Whether the world is actually pivoting away from fossil fuels faster is something we will measure in pipeline cancellations, capital flows, and emissions curves over the next several years—not in conference communiqués. But the rhetorical floor moved in Santa Marta. “Fossil fuel” went from a phrase carefully edited out of negotiated text to the title of a conference that 57 governments showed up to. Coalitions of the doers tend to start small and either grow or fade. This one is worth watching.

What You Can Do

Individual action alone will not phase out fossil fuels. But the policy decisions that will, especially over the next 18 months heading into COP31, are shaped by sustained public pressure and personal choices that signal demand:

• Track the workstreams. Santa Marta’s three workstreams (national roadmaps, finance, trade) and the Brazilian COP30 presidency’s informal fossil fuel roadmap will be the substantive deliverables to watch ahead of COP31. Climate Home News, Carbon Brief, and the Fossil Fuel Treaty initiative all publish detailed updates.
• Ask your representatives where they stand. In the U.S., neither party invited Santa Marta participants. State and city governments, however, can join subnational coalitions like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. Local action remains the most practical lever.
• Reduce your own exposure to oil price volatility. Heat pumps, EVs, and rooftop or community solar are the household-scale equivalent of energy security policy. Federal tax credits remain available for many of these in 2026, though the IRA framework is under active threat—worth acting before that changes.
• Support utilities and pension funds that are divesting from fossil fuels. Where you have a vote, whether as a customer, a shareholder, or a pension participant, ask whether the organization is screening for fossil fuel transition risk.
• Donate or volunteer with groups doing transition work. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, Climate Action Network, and Indigenous-led organizations like the Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon were central to making Santa Marta happen.

The post Santa Marta May Be the Moment the World Started Walking Away From Fossil Fuels appeared first on Earth911.

EarthDay.org encourages everyone to invest in the Earth. While that might mean buying stock in sustainable companies, it’s not the only way. Investing in our planet means everyone—governments, businesses, and individuals—doing their part. It’s about building a sustainable green economy, similar to how the world shifted from analog to digital after the space race. Even if you don’t own stocks, you can still support a green economy as a consumer, a citizen, and a community member.

“Everything has to be reinvented in a world of shrinking resources. So why not teach it? Why not embrace it? Why not say we’re going to the moon?” asked Kathleen Rogers, president and CEO of EarthDay.org, in 2022.

Consumers

It’s a common myth that companies only sell what consumers want. If that were true, advertising wouldn’t be such a huge industry. Still, consumers do have influence. If more people chose electric vehicles over SUVs, car companies would offer more EVs and fewer gas-guzzlers.

Consumers can learn more and pick sustainable options. Websites like this one offer tips for finding greener products, from mattresses to shampoo. Every small choice helps, but we can’t solve climate change just by shopping differently.

“We all have hard choices to make and can’t do everything right,” says Rogers. We just have to do the best we can, starting with the most obvious improvements.

“Don’t buy pesticides,” says Rogers. Simply eliminating the intentional purchase of poisons makes a big difference. After that, prioritize choices that either require little effort, like recycling, or that make a big difference in your impact.

But as Michael Maniates, author of The Living-Green Myth, said recently on Sustainability In Your Ear, “It seems to me that our best chance for making a difference is to start thinking, or maybe just thinking harder, about how to be a citizen in community with others, not as a solitary consumer in the checkout line.” He believes green choices are good, but they aren’t enough without getting involved in politics.

Citizens

“Being a conscious citizen is the political piece. It’s register and vote for candidates who have really good plans that will not just promote the economy, but a green one. Because that’s the future,” Rogers said. “There’s some great Republicans on the environment, great Democrats, great Independents. Find them. Find them and vote for them. For the health of our kids, vote green.” If you can’t find a good candidate, become one yourself and run for office.

Don’t underestimate the importance of local elections. EarthDay.org is campaigning for universal climate education in classrooms because schools determine whether kids develop the 21st-century skills that will allow them to make green innovations and discover sustainable climate change solutions.

“If you don’t have an educated public and workforce, who’s going to make the stuff? If you don’t build green consumers, who’s going to buy the stuff? If you don’t educate the kids, who’s going to vote for green politicians?” asks Rogers. If you have kids in school, get involved in the PTA and help ensure kids have access to climate literacy education.

Citizens are also responsible for holding their elected representatives accountable. Write or call your representatives about environmental issues often.

Community

Whether you decide to run for office or prefer to keep your involvement to voting, you can still be an active member of your community. You can join local cleanups, support local businesses—especially regenerative farmers—and plant trees.

EarthDay.org’s Canopy Project primarily works with communities in developing countries. But you can be part of urban reforestation in your own neighborhood.

“We urge people to take tree cover seriously,” says Rogers. Many homeowners see trees as a nuisance because they block views or damage sidewalks. But trees offer much more than just beauty. They provide habitat, store carbon, help reduce the heat island effect—which matters more as summers get hotter—and even filter pollutants.

Even if you can’t plant a tree, you can grow a tomato plant in a pot by your front door or herbs in an apartment window. “It connects us to the natural world in a way nothing else can, and it’s a great educational tool for kids,” says Rogers.

Your workplace is part of your community too, so individuals also play a role in making businesses greener.

“Every industry has opportunities,” says Rogers. Take a look at how your workplace operates. Try to encourage greener choices in your company’s processes and purchasing decisions.

If you can’t manage green consumer choices, citizenship, and community action all at once—or even at all—don’t be hard on yourself.

“Stop blaming us and look at the combination of issues,” says Rogers. No one person has to do it all; we all just have to do the best we can.

Financial and Charitable Investments

One of the most direct ways to back your environmental values is with your investment portfolio and your charitable giving. The sustainable investment market has grown dramatically: assets under management in global sustainable funds reached $3.9 trillion in Q4 2025, up 15% from the prior year, even as ESG investing faced political headwinds in the U.S. That growth reflects a structural shift, not a trend: 88% of global individual investors express interest in sustainable investing, according to a Morgan Stanley survey, with younger generations leading the way.

The options have also expanded well beyond socially responsible mutual funds. Here are several ways to align your money with your values.

Causeway Impact

Doug Heske, founder of Newday Impact Investing and a frequent guest on Earth911’s Sustainability In Your Ear podcast, has built one of the more thoughtful platforms for deploying investment capital to advance environmental and social priorities.

The company’s newest offering, Causeway, brings together high-quality investment portfolios and direct links to vetted nonprofits, so you can see your financial returns and charitable giving in one place. Newday’s portfolios focus on six impact areas: climate action, air and water quality, biodiversity and conservation, healthy soils regeneration, and human equity. A personal impact timeline gives real-time updates from nonprofit partners, letting you track results—from carbon emissions reduced to wells built—alongside your financial performance.

ESG and Clean Energy ETFs

If you want broad market exposure with an environmental focus, ESG exchange-traded funds are the easiest place to start. Large index ETFs from Vanguard (ESGV) and iShares screen for environmental, social, and governance factors while keeping fees low. Expense ratios for major ESG index funds are now between 0.08 and 0.15% per year. Thematic clean energy funds, like the iShares Global Clean Energy ETF and Invesco Solar ETF (TAN), give you more focused exposure to renewable energy, but they are more volatile and work better as smaller parts of your portfolio.

Green Bonds

Green bonds support specific environmental projects such as renewable energy installations, energy-efficient buildings, and sustainable water systems. They have become a major type of fixed-income investment. By 2025, global green bond issuance passed $600 billion each year, with forecasts of about $950 billion in new bonds in 2026. The iShares USD Green Bond ETF (BGRN) offers easy access to investment-grade green bonds for investors who want less risk than stocks but still want to support the environment.

Donor-Advised Funds for Environmental Giving

If charitable giving is your primary goal, a donor-advised fund (DAF) lets you make a tax-deductible contribution now and direct grants to environmental nonprofits over time. Funds like Tides Foundation and Environmental Defense Fund’s giving programs can help channel charitable dollars toward proven climate and conservation organizations. For a more integrated approach, Causeway’s platform (above) connects investment portfolios directly with nonprofit partners, letting impact-oriented investors support both at once.

A quick warning: not all “green” funds are the same. Read fund documents closely, look for clear impact reporting along with financial results, and be wary of ESG labels that don’t have third-party verification. If an investment claims to be sustainable but doesn’t explain how it chooses its holdings, it could be greenwashing.

Related Reading

• Sustainability In Your Ear: Doug Heske on Responsible Energy Investing
• Invest in the Earth This Earth Day and Every Day
• Regenerative Agriculture to Restore Our Earth
• How to Combat the Urban Heat Island Effect

Editor’s Note: Originally authored by Gemma Alexander on March 18, 2022, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.

The post How You Can Invest in Our Planet appeared first on Earth911.

The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970 — 56 years ago — and, goodness, how the world has changed since then. We’ve come a long way since the days of burning our trash and pumping our gas guzzlers with leaded gasoline. In honor of those 56 years, here are 56 important changes and milestones since the first Earth Day.

Legislation

The U.S. government has led much of the environmental charge, starting with the implementation of the EPA (1) in July 1970. Later that year, the Clean Air Act (2) targeted air pollutants, followed by the Clean Water Act (3) in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act (4) in 1973.

Some lesser-known national laws included the Safe Water Drinking Act (5) in 1974, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (6) in 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act (7) in 1976, the National Energy Act (8) in 1978, and the Medical Waste Tracking Act (9) in 1988.

In some cases, states have led the charge. Oregon passed the first bottle bill (10) in 1971, Minnesota’s Clean Indoor Air Act (11) was the first law to restrict smoking in public places (1975), and Massachusetts required low-flush toilets (12) for construction and remodeling in 1988.

Green Innovations: The Early Years

In order to comply with all the laws from the 1970s, we needed new technology to ensure consumers could adhere to the new standards. Consider:

• The “Crying Indian” PSA debuts in 1971 (13)
• Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) gets banned in 1972 (14)
• The energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb launches in 1973 (15)
• Cars begin displaying fuel economy labels in the mid-1970s (16)
• In 1975, all cars are manufactured with catalytic converters to limit exhaust emissions (17)
• Chlorofluorocarbons are banned from aerosol cans starting in 1978 (18)
• The first curbside recycling program begins in New Jersey in 1980 (19)
• In 1986, McDonald’s switches from foam to paper food containers (20)
• Mercury is removed from latex paint in 1990, providing a viable alternative to banned lead paint (21)
• Earth911 launches the first U.S. recycling directory in 1991 (22)
• Energy Star certification debuts in 1992 for appliances and electronics (23)
• The U.S. Green Building Council begins in 1993 (24)

The Political Movement

The Green Party (25) launched in 1984, which was just the beginning of green issues entering the mainstream. One Percent for the Planet (26) was founded in 2002 to challenge businesses to donate to environmental causes, and the ISO 14001 standard (27) established environmental management. Companies are now facing pressure to allow employee telecommuting (28).

Things really developed after the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (29) in 2006. NBC debuted Green Week (30) in 2007. Carbon offsets (31) alleviated corporate green guilt. Bisphenol A (32) made us all question plastic purchases. Hybrid vehicles (33) generated tax credits and gas savings. Plastic bag bans gave rise to a reusable bag (34) craze. Fracking (35) and the Dakota Access Pipeline (36) were two of the most hotly contested news stories of the decade, at least until the 2016 election.

Green Tech: The Next Wave

In the past 10 years, emerging green tech has made eco-friendly a way of life, including:

• LED light bulbs (37)
• Portable solar panels on backpacks and watches (38)
• Plant-based plastics (39)
• Motion sensor lighting (40)
• Faucets with automatic shut-off (41)
• Low volatile organic compound (VOC) paint (42)
• Recycled plastic clothing (43)
• Ride-sharing mobile applications (44)
• Natural cleaning products (45)
• Biodiesel engine vehicles (46)
• Food waste composting (47)
• Portable air purifiers (48)
• Europe’s Green Deal introduced global recyclables shipping regulations to reduce pollution in low-income nations (49)
• Corporate borrowers headed toward $500 billion in bond financings for the renewables transition (50)
• President Biden rejoins the Paris Climate Accord on his first day in office. (51)

The Latest Five: 2022–2026

The pace of innovation has not slowed. Five more milestones have reshaped the environmental landscape since that 51st Earth Day:

• The Inflation Reduction Act (52), signed into law in August 2022, became the largest climate investment in U.S. history, directing roughly $370 billion toward clean energy tax credits, EV incentives, methane reduction, and domestic clean manufacturing. Analysts projected it will drive more than $4 trillion in cumulative capital investment over a decade and put the U.S. on track for a 40% emissions reduction by 2030. Sadly, many of its key provisions have been defunded or eliminated by the Trump Administration.
• The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (53), adopted by 188 governments in December 2022, set the most ambitious biodiversity protection commitment in history. Its headline “30×30” target calls for conserving 30% of the planet’s land, freshwater, and ocean areas by 2030, a goal that would require doubling current protected land coverage and quadrupling marine protections.
• America’s first commercial direct air capture plant (54), opened by Heirloom Carbon Technologies in Tracy, California in November 2023, marked the arrival of atmospheric carbon removal at commercial scale on U.S. soil. The plant uses limestone to absorb CO₂ directly from the air, with the captured carbon injected into concrete for permanent storage. In May 2024, Climeworks activated the world’s largest direct air capture facility, the Mammoth plant in Iceland, with a design capacity to remove 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year.
• Solid-state batteries (55), a next-generation alternative to conventional lithium-ion technology, moved from laboratory promise toward commercial reality between 2022 and 2026. Unlike liquid-electrolyte batteries, solid-state versions are less flammable, achieve higher energy density, and degrade more slowly. In early 2025, Mercedes-Benz began road-testing a prototype EV powered by a lithium-metal solid-state cell that extended driving range 25% over comparable liquid-battery models. Multiple automakers and cell manufacturers now target commercial production between 2027 and 2030.
• Perovskite and tandem solar cells (56), a new photovoltaic technology that pairs conventional silicon with thin perovskite layers, pushed solar efficiency into territory once considered theoretical. By 2024, tandem cells in laboratory settings exceeded 34% efficiency — well above the roughly 22% ceiling of standard silicon panels only a few years ago. manufacturers in Asia and Europe began scaling pilot production lines. Because perovskite cells can be printed on flexible substrates, they open the door to solar surfaces on buildings, vehicles, and everyday objects that conventional panels cannot reach.

The past 56 years have been huge when it comes to saving the environment. Expect more to come, including a resurgent EV industry, nuclear fusion, regenerative agriculture, restorative forestry, and more, as costs and the cool factor improve.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on April 18, 2018, this article was most recently updated in April 2026.

The post 56 Environmental Innovations in the 56 Years Since Earth Day Began appeared first on Earth911.

About two tons of satellite material burns up in Earth’s atmosphere every day. That is the steady-state exhaust of a single company’s broadband network, SpaceX’s Starlink, operating at its current scale. Each vaporized spacecraft leaves behind aluminum oxide, lithium, copper, and a growing list of metals the upper atmosphere has never had to contained in these quantities before.

We’re following a familiar human pattern. A commons, like the low earth orbit (LEO) region of space, is declared abundant. Commercial activity scales faster than science can measure the consequences. Governance lags by a decade or more. By the time the damage is legible, it is already expensive to reverse.

We did this to rivers in the 19th century, to the atmosphere in the 20th, and to the deep ocean in a quiet accumulation that stretched across both. A new peer-reviewed analysis published in Advances in Space Research makes clear that LEO is now on the same trajectory, and the chemistry is moving faster than the regulation.

An Atmosphere Already Dominated by Human Metal

The paper, an update to a 2021 study, reassesses how much spacecraft material is now being injected into the mesosphere and lower thermosphere as satellites and rocket stages burn up on reentry. The comparison it draws is that for several metals commonly used in spacecraft, anthropogenic injection now rivals or exceeds the natural input from meteoroids.

What was already true in 2021 is more true now. The researchers incorporate direct observations from stratospheric aerosol sampling — work led by Daniel Murphy at NOAA and published in PNAS in 2023 — which confirmed that roughly 10 percent of stratospheric aerosol particles now contain aluminum and other metals traceable to satellite and rocket-stage burn-up. For decades, the natural baseline was micrometeoroid ablation, what space sent naturally toward our planet. Earth sweeps up roughly 30 to 50 metric tons of cosmic dust every day, a steady rain of mostly sand-grain-sized particles left over from comets and asteroids. Those grains hit the upper atmosphere at speeds between 11 and 72 kilometers per second, vaporize in a thin layer between about 75 and 110 kilometers altitude, and seed the mesosphere with iron, magnesium, silicon, sodium, and trace amounts of nickel, calcium, and aluminum. This process has been running for the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet. The metal layers it produces in the upper atmosphere are well-mapped; they are the chemistry the stratosphere evolved with.

Aluminum is a useful tracer because it is a small share of the natural input. Cosmic dust is dominated by silicates and iron, with aluminum running on the order of one to two percent by mass. So when researchers began detecting elevated aluminum in stratospheric aerosol particles in the early 2020s, the signal was unambiguous — meteoritic infall could not account for it. The source had to be terrestrial in origin, vaporized at altitude. Spacecraft, in other words.

Human vehicles have become a second, larger source.

The near-term trajectory is worse. Researchers at the University of Southern California documented an eightfold increase in stratospheric aluminum oxide between 2016 and 2022, corresponding almost exactly to the ramp-up of Starlink and other satellite megaconstellations. In 2022 alone, reentering satellites released an estimated 17 metric tons of aluminum oxide nanoparticles — raising total atmospheric aluminum input about 29.5 percent above natural levels.

The Ocean Parallel

Consider the deep ocean in the 1960s. Dumping was legal, monitoring was barely funded, and the prevailing assumption was that the ocean was big enough to absorb anything. We now know the answer to that assumption after finding microplastics in Mariana Trench amphipods, pharmaceutical residues in Arctic sediment cores, and PFAS in polar bear blood.

Low Earth orbit is in the 1960s-ocean phase. The prevailing assumption among launch operators is that satellites that burn up are satellites that disappear. Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in global politics and international law, put this directly in a 2024 interview with Scientific American: “There’s this widespread assumption that something burning up in the atmosphere disappears, but, of course, mass never disappears.”

What it does instead is change form. A 250-kilogram satellite, typically about 30 percent aluminum by mass, generates roughly 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide nanoparticles as it ablates through the mesosphere. Those particles are small enough — 1 to 100 nanometers — that they can drift in the stratosphere for decades before settling. Aluminum oxide is not inert. It catalyzes the chlorine reactions that destroy stratospheric ozone, the same chemistry the Montreal Protocol was designed to stop. Crucially, the particles are not consumed in those reactions; they continue to destroy ozone molecules for the duration of their atmospheric lifetime.

The Scale Is Not Hypothetical

As of April 2026, SpaceX alone operates more than 10,000 active Starlink satellites, roughly two-thirds of all functioning spacecraft in orbit. The company has launched over 11,700 total, with about 1,500 already deorbited and replaced. Starlink satellites are designed for a five-year operational life, which means the constellation is, by design, a continuous churn: launch, operate, burn, launch again.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Eutelsat’s OneWeb, and a growing roster of Chinese state-backed constellations are moving toward similar architectures. The European Space Agency now tracks roughly 40,000 objects in low Earth orbit, about 11,000 of them active payloads, the rest debris or derelict hardware. Statistical models from ESA estimate another 130 million fragments smaller than one centimeter, each traveling fast enough to destroy whatever it hits.

Research published in Geophysical Research Letters projects that once currently planned megaconstellations are fully deployed, roughly 912 metric tons of aluminum will reenter the atmosphere every year, producing around 360 tons of aluminum oxide annually. A separate NOAA modeling study published in 2025 found that sustained alumina injection at expected 2040 levels could alter polar vortex speeds, warm parts of the mesosphere by as much as 1.5°C, and measurably impact the ozone layer.

Two Kinds of Pollution, One Commons

The orbital damage is happening on two fronts simultaneously, and they reinforce each other.

Atmospheric injection is the slow-accumulating chemistry problem. Every satellite that completes its mission becomes tomorrow’s stratospheric dust. A newly upgraded lidar system at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany can now simultaneously detect lithium, sodium, copper, titanium, silicon, gold, silver, and lead in the upper atmosphere — each element a chemical fingerprint for specific spacecraft components. On February 20, 2025, the instrument registered a sudden spike in lithium vapor that researchers traced to a Falcon 9 upper stage reentering overhead.

The measurement capability is arriving just as the pollution is scaling.

Orbital debris is the faster-moving physical problem. SpaceX reported that its Starlink satellites executed 144,404 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the first half of 2025, due to collision warnings every couple of minutes, for six months straight — three times the previous rate. Two Starlink satellites have fragmented in orbit in the past four months, each creating a trackable debris field. Space is getting filled with junk that led to the International Space Station performing avoidance maneuvers twice in a single six-day window in November 2024, and again in April 2025.

Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the debris-tracking firm LeoLabs, told IEEE Spectrum that certain orbital altitudes at 775, 840, and 975 kilometers have already passed the debris-density threshold where collisions generate fragments faster than atmospheric drag can remove them. This is known as the Kessler syndrome, proposed by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in 1978, and it is no longer hypothetical in every band.

“Some operators in low Earth orbit are ignoring known long-term effects of behavior for short-term gain,” McKnight said, “Some will not change behavior until something bad happens.”

The Governance Gap

There is no body that regulates the cumulative atmospheric impact of satellite reentries. No operator is required to submit an environmental impact assessment for a constellation’s aggregate burn-up.

The FCC licenses spectrum.

National launch authorities license liftoff.

Debris mitigation guidelines from the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space are voluntary, and compliance is inconsistent. The chemistry of the upper atmosphere is, in regulatory terms, nobody’s jurisdiction.

The United Nations Environment Program took a first step in late 2025, releasing a report titled Safeguarding Space: Environmental Issues, Risks and Responsibilities. It framed space debris and atmospheric injection as “emerging issues” deserving the attention international bodies already give to ocean pollution and transboundary air quality. This is the same framing UNEP used for atmospheric ozone depletion in the 1970s before the Montreal Protocol. Measuring something does not fix it. But it is the necessary precondition for fixing it — and for the first time, the measurement infrastructure is catching up to the pollution.

The Counter-Case, Honestly

Not every specialist agrees the situation is as urgent as the headlines suggest. A skeptical review published in March 2026 argued that the Kessler cascade framing oversimplifies a risk that plays out on timescales of decades to centuries, and in specific orbital bands rather than across all of LEO. The review is right on one narrow point: the ISS has operated continuously at 400 kilometers since 2000, its debris risk is managed in real time, and the environment is not in a runaway state.

What the skeptical case does not resolve is the atmospheric chemistry. The Kessler debate is about whether low-earth orbit becomes unusable. The alumina question is about whether the recovery of the ozone layer — a genuine success story of international environmental governance — is quietly being undone from above. Those are different problems. The first might take a century. The second is already measurable and is projected to worsen within fifteen years.

The post We Are Doing to Low Earth Orbit What We Did to the Oceans appeared first on Earth911.