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US: Wisconsin - UW Researchers Find Microplastics In BWCAW
We’ve already known that microplastics are floating throughout Lake Superior, that they are in our drinking water, that they are in fish we catch and that they are even in our beer
Tiny Bits of Plastic Have Turned Up In Worms,
Soil, And Water In The Supposedly Pristine Wilderness.
Written By: John Myers | October 25, 2019
UW-Eau Claire students Reed Kostelny (left) and Thomas Adams are part of a research team that found microplastics in earthworms, water and soil in the BWCAW. (Photo courtesy UW-Eau Claire)
We’ve already known that microplastics are floating throughout Lake Superior, that they are in our drinking water, that they are in fish we catch and that they are even in our beer.
So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire have found tiny pieces of plastic in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the most pristine area of the Northland.
Researchers found microplastics in earthworms, in the water and in the soil that they collected this summer from sites within the BWCAW, said Todd Wellnitz, professor of biology and the faculty leader on the research project.
“We found 80 pieces of microplastics in one earthworm that we examined,” Wellnitz said in a statement. “That blew me away.”
Plastics that are less than five millimeters in length, about the size of a sesame seed, are known as microplastics. They can come from a variety of sources, including synthetic clothing, soaps, toothpaste, plastic packaging and containers such as water bottles.
While microplastic beads have been banned from many consumer products, hundreds, even thousands, of plastic fibers can be shed from one fleece garment every time it’s washed. And larger pieces of plastic — including water bottles, plastic bags and packaging of all sorts — eventually break down into microplastics when left out in the environment. Once they reach the micro size, they seem to persist indefinitely.
While significant research has been done on the presence of microplastics in oceans, rivers and the Great Lakes, less has been done on plastics in smaller, freshwater lakes.
"We're finding microplastics in the Boundary Waters, and that’s a big deal,” Wellnitz said. “No place is pristine now; microplastics are everywhere. It’s all over the planet, and we’re just realizing it.”
The UW-Eau Claire research team, including, from left, Megan Vaillancourt, Todd Wellnitz and Monica Dickson, is continuing to study samples of soil and water taken from the BWCAW during two trips there this summer. Photo courtesy UW - Eau Claire.
After finding microplastics in the earthworms on a June excursion, the researchers returned to the BWCAW in August, this time collecting soil, water, earthworms and crayfish samples.
The samples were collected from areas primarily near campsites, said Reed Kostelny, a junior environmental biology major from Appleton, Wis. They found the most microplastics in samples taken from the lake closest to the Boundary Waters entry site.
“We know that earthworms do consume microplastics,” Kostelny said of their findings. “Now that we have our early data, we want to know more about the worms and how the microplastics could move up the food chain.”
Since birds, fish, and other wildlife consume earthworms, microplastics have likely already entered the food chain in the Minnesota wilderness area, Wellnitz said.
Earthworms are not native to the Boundary Waters area but are brought in by visitors who come to fish the many freshwater lakes found within the area, said Megan Vaillancourt, a senior microbiology major from Stillwater, Minn.
“Fishermen bring the worms in, and the worms are ingesting the plastics we bring in with us,” Vaillancourt said. “That’s a double negative for the area.”
Most visitors do embrace the “leave no trace” mantra in the BWCAW. But microplastics shed easily, so they may be coming from clothing, blankets, tarps and other supplies that visitors routinely bring into the Boundary Waters, Vaillancourt said. Since microplastics are so small that they can’t easily be seen, people have no idea they are leaving them behind.
Microplastics also can move from place to place via rain or wind, so they likely are entering the Boundary Waters in multiple ways, the researchers said.
Microplastics first made News Tribune headlines in 2013 after scientists, including Lorena Rios-Mendoza, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Superior's Lake Superior Research Institute, dragged super-fine mesh across the Great Lakes and caught millions of plastic pieces.
In a study published in 2018 in the journal Plos One, Mary Kosuth, a master's graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, found that eight of nine tap water samples taken from all five Great Lakes had plastics in them. And Kosuth, a Duluth native, found that all 12 brands of beers she tested brewed with Great Lakes water had plastics inside. It's a global phenomenon, she noted, with a 2014 study reporting plastic found in 24 brands of German beer.
Kosuth also looked beyond the Great Lakes and looked at tap water from 159 municipal sources from 14 countries, with 81% carrying plastic particles.
Kosuth noted that global plastic production has skyrocketed from 30 million tons in 1970 to 322 million tons in 2015, and each year more of that stuff ends up in the environment. She echoed what Northland researchers and conservation activists have said for years: If you want to get plastic out of the lakes and oceans, you need to get it out of your hands and your home.
The News Tribune in 2016 reported a study by Rochester Institute of Technology researchers that estimated nearly 22 million pounds of plastics enter the Great Lakes every year.
Those products get blown (or thrown) into the lakes and eventually disintegrate into plastic bits, some of them smaller than grains of sand. But the plastic bits never go away, and they have spread across the Great Lakes ecosystem.
Scientists say the human health ramifications of ingesting plastic in the water, beer, fish and other items remain unknown. Not only may the plastic itself be bad but the bits can also carry other contaminants.
These Photos of Submerged North Carolina Livestock Farms Are Devastating
North Carolina’s rivers basins, now swollen with rainwater from Hurricane Florence, are home to thousands of large indoor hog and poultry farms, as well as cesspools of liquid hog waste. Predictably—just as happened two years ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew—floods and factory-scale livestock farming are proving to be a toxic and deadly (for the animals) mix.
Millions of Animals Have Perished
TOM PHILPOTT SEPTEMBER 18, 2018
This is your chicken during a flood. Rick Dove/Waterkeeper Alliance
North Carolina’s rivers basins, now swollen with rainwater from Hurricane Florence, are home to thousands of large indoor hog and poultry farms, as well as cesspools of liquid hog waste. Predictably—just as happened two years ago in the wake of Hurricane Matthew—floods and factory-scale livestock farming are proving to be a toxic and deadly (for the animals) mix.
A group called the Waterkeeper Alliance sends pilots into the air in after North Carolina flood events to document the damage done to these operations. The group uploads aerial photo to a Flickr feed, which will be updated regularly over the next several days. The first flights went up Monday, after Florence’s rainstorms had petered out, and the imagery is stark. Below are some just-posted images the group took during Monday’s flights.
In this one, the four long, narrow structures are indoor poultry barns, almost completely submerged.
Rick Dove / Waterkeeper Alliance
This one shows a similar scene, in West of Trenton, NC: four poultry barns, mostly under water.
In the one below, a massive hog operation with multiple barns and a manure lagoon—that rectangular pink thing, top right—has barely escaped inundation. But note that river flows from the storm have not peaked, and more severe flooding could yet happen.
In this one, a hog operation in West of Trenton, NC, the barns are mostly underwater and the manure lagoon has been topped by flood waters.
Matt Butler / Sound Rivers
Then there’s the startling photo below, sent to me by Matthew Starr, the Upper Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers, taken from the air yesterday. It depicts a liquid manure from a hog lagoon being pumped directly into floodwater.
Larry Baldwin / Crystal Coast Waterkeeper
Since the rivers are still cresting, it’s too early to tell how much much toxic manure will flow into North Carolina’s waterways in Florence’s wake, or how many animals will perish. Early indications are chilling. Sanderson Farms, the nation’s third-largest chicken producer, issued a statement Monday revealing that 60 of the 880 chicken barns that grow birds under contract for the company had flooded, killing an estimated 1.7 million birds of the around 20 million the company currently holds in the state. The statement added:
In addition, approximately thirty farms, housing approximately 211,000 chickens per farm, in the Lumberton, North Carolina, area are isolated by flood waters and the Company is unable to reach those farms with feed trucks. Losses of live inventory could escalate if the Company does not regain access to those farms.
That means around 6 million additional chickens are currently cut off from feed deliveries and could soon perish.
In the next episode of Bite podcast, which will air Friday, I catch up with Watereeper Alliance about what they’re seeing as they document the destruction. I also talk to retired eastern North Carolina chicken farmer Craig Watts—who until January 2016 grew birds under contract with another giant chicken company, Perdue—about the stress and financial risks incurred by contract farmers during these increasingly frequent catastrophes.
Just two years ago, months after Watts retired, Hurricane Matthew wrought similar destruction upon North Carolina’s CAFO-intensive, river-crossed coastal plain. According to Waterkeeper’s Starr, “in the two years since, no action was taken by the [meat] industry” to shut down operations in flood-prone areas.
Monsanto’s Court Ruling Marks A Turning Point For Cancer-Causing Weed Killer
What started as a $289 million fine just had an even bigger financial effect on pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer. It’s now down $14 billion.
by Kristin Houser August 13, 2018 Health & Medicine
DAMAGING DAMAGES. What started as a $289 million fine just had an even bigger financial effect on pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer. It’s now down $14 billion.
On Friday, a state court in San Francisco, California, ruled that Monsanto — an agritech company Bayer acquired in June — owed California school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson $289 million in damages. The reason: the company’s weedkillers Roundup and Ranger Pro gave him terminal cancer and weren’t adequately labeled to detail those risks.
Monsanto announced plans to appeal the court’s decision, but that couldn’t stop Bayer’s shares from plunging 12 percent on Monday, the equivalent of roughly $14 billion in value.
BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH? For years, health- and environmentally-focused agencies have debated whether or not glyphosate, the key chemical in both Roundup and Ranger Pro, actually causes cancer. In March 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency within the World Health Organization (WHO), determined it is “probably carcinogenic in humans.”
However, in December 2017, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis of numerous studies led to the conclusion that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans — the data suggested the relationship wasn’t there (of course, the $120 million Monsanto and Bayer spent on U.S. government lobbying in the decade prior to that decision could have had some influence on it).
BAD FOR THE BOTTOM LINE. Carcinogenic or not, Monsanto’s glyphosate-containing products are still widely available, and that might not be in Bayer’s best interest if it loses its appeal of the California case. Johnson’s lawsuit is one of about 5,000 like it, and they could just keep coming as long as Monsanto’s glyphosate products are on the market.
If each of those existing lawsuits returns the same verdict as Johnson’s, Bayer could owe a whopping $1.45 trillion in damages — more than enough to bankrupt a company with a market cap around $104 billion.
But if just a single ruling in favor of the plaintiff was enough to cut Bayer’s value by 12 percent, Bayer may not need 5,000 verdicts to see some pretty substantial damage. Similar effects in the stock market from any future verdicts might mean that Bayer seriously regrets acquiring Monsanto — assuming it survives the aftermath.
READ MORE: Roundup Cancer Verdict Sends Bayer Shares Sliding [Reuters]
References: Reuters
August 13, 2018
6 Ways We’re Letting Our Soil Die – And How We Can Save It
One thing is for certain: we can’t risk playing fast and loose with our soils. As US president Franklin D Roosevelt once wrote: “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/soil-nature-biodiversity-farming/
July 18, 2018
Unless you’re an avid gardener, you probably don’t give much thought to soil. It’s that dark muddy stuff that dirties your shoes. But farmers are utterly reliant on it to grow most of our food crops and to raise livestock on pasture it nurtures.
So we are all reliant on soil for our breakfast cereals, our milk, our beef…and much more. Are farmers treating the soil with the respect it deserves, though? Here are six soil concerns – and some solutions.
Less matter
Organic matter is the lifeblood of a healthy soil. But a government survey this year found that just a third of farmers keep track of it. The organic matter gets into the soil through the decomposition of plants on the soil surface (the stems and leaves after a crop has been harvested), from living and dead soil organisms, or by adding compost or manure.
As it decomposes into humus, nutrients are released back into the soil and become available for future crops. Organic matter helps the soil to hold water, aids in reducing soil compaction and improves soil structure.
Britain’s garden allotments are significantly healthier than intensively farmed soils. Allotment soil has a third more organic matter, according to one study. Three-quarters of allotment holders add manure to their soil, 95 percent add composted garden waste and many add organic-based commercial composts.
But many non-organic farmers don’t add enough. Intensive, crop-growing farmland needs frequent applications of manure and compost because continuously harvesting crops depletes soil humus.
(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
Fewer little rotters
Without an army of soil-living rotters – fungi, bacteria, worms, mites and more – plant material would never decompose to produce humus, the dark, nutrient-rich part of the soil. These little rotters are the original recyclers and we destroy them at our peril. Dr. Maria Tsiafouli of Thessaloniki University has found that intensive farming reduces their volume by as much as 50 percent. Earthworms, mites, and springtails, in particular, have declined.
“These losses make agricultural land less healthy and more vulnerable to pests and diseases,” says Dr. Tsiafouli. That’s something the farming industry needs to take heed of; it might eventually threaten the functioning of farmed soils. The solution? Add far more organic matter to help the rotters thrive.
Water runoff
Rain percolates into soils if its structure is intact. But where the structure of the soil has broken down, it runs off fields, taking some of the soil (and any pesticides and fertilizers it contains) into watercourses. Soil depositing on riverbeds damages the spawning habitat of fish and can kill aquatic plants and animals.
Drive along a country road in autumn and look at the mud running out of field gateways. Rainy autumn harvesting of late-maturing crops such as maize doesn’t help. Nor does soil compaction – when soil particles are pressed together – which reduces rain infiltration and soil aeration, both essential for crop root growth.
With increasingly heavy field machinery, compaction worsens. A tractor in the 1940s weighed perhaps four tons; today they can be 10 to 20 tons.
Soil degradation in England and Wales is estimated to cost up to £1.4bn annually. The solution? Planting fast-growing cover crops on bare soil between main crops is now an EU requirement. Lighter-weight field equipment would help. So would less maize growing.
(Photo: Maigheach-gheal)
Killer sprays
Farmers have to contend with an array of food-crop pests. Some of these are fungi, common in our warm, damp climate, smuts, mildews and rusts.
The usual treatment is to spray fungicides. But many fungicides are only effective at preventing outbreaks of fungal disease rather than treating infected plants. And fungicide resistance is increasing, just as resistance to antibiotics is.
Fungicide applications also kill hugely beneficial soil mycorrhizal fungi, which live with plant roots and garner minerals and nutrients from the soil to aid their growth.
The solution lies with more organic farming methods, using less harmful chemicals, and inbreeding disease-resistant crop varieties and – in the longer term – using genetically modified varieties.
Soil erosion Exposed soil and windy conditions don’t mix. As our climate warms and storms become more frequent, exposed soils are vulnerable to erosion.
Ever since Jethro Tull invented the mechanical seed drill in the 18th century, the land has been plowed.
But why not leave any soil mixing to crop roots and the natural soil fauna? Unploughed soils have more organic matter, more aeration and less tendency to experience drying out or waterlogging. And they get less compacted because less heavy equipment runs over them.
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“No, till” farming is already popular in the US, and it’s becoming more common here. The seed for the next crop is drilled directly into the unploughed soil. “It’s better for retaining soil moisture and eliminating soil erosion,” says Jake Freestone, farm manager on the Overbury Estate in Gloucestershire. “No-till is a win-win for me.”
Biodiversity under threat
Name our richest wildlife habitat. Broadleaved woodland? Lowland heath? The soil is far, far richer: a habitat for huge numbers of bacteria, algae, fungi, worms, insects, small vertebrates, and plants.
Underneath arable crops there might be five tons of living organisms per hectare; under grassland, it might be 20 tons per hectare.
Yet conservationists rarely mention soil. And the UK’s State of Nature Report, which pools data from more than 50 nature conservation and research organizations “to give a cutting-edge overview of the state of nature”, hardly mentions it.
But soil biodiversity is under threat across 56 percent of the EU’s land area, its animal populations reduced by as much as 50 percent on intensively managed farms.
“The problem for conservationists is that soil is a bit out of sight, out of mind with a paucity of flagship species,” says Matt Shardlow, CEO of Buglife, a charity whose motto is: “Saving the small things that run the planet”. He adds: “It’s also hard to measure soil wildlife health and decide what’s important”.
One thing is for certain: we can’t risk playing fast and loose with our soils. As US president Franklin D Roosevelt once wrote: “The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Dr. Malcolm Smith is a former chief scientist at Countryside Council for Wales and the author of ‘Ploughing a New Furrow: A Blueprint for Wildlife-Friendly Farming’ (£18.99, Whittles)
FAO Releases Alarming Report On Soil Pollution
FAO Releases Alarming Report On Soil Pollution
Untreated urban waste is amongst those human activities that contaminate our soils. Credit: Hermes Rivera on Unsplash
ROME, May 4, 2018 (IPS) - Soil pollution is posing a serious threat to our environment, to our sources of food and ultimately to our health. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warns that there is still a lack of awareness about the scale and severity of this threat.
FAO released a report titled “Soil Pollution: A Hidden Reality” at the start of a global symposium which has been taking place 2-4 May 2018 at FAO headquarters, participated by experts and policymakers to discuss the threat of soil pollution in order to build an effective framework for a cohesive international response.
Background: What is soil pollution?
“Soil pollution refers to the presence of a chemical or substance out of place and/or present at a higher than the normal concentration that has adverse effects on any non-targeted organism. Soil pollution often cannot be directly assessed or visually perceived, making it a hidden danger” states the FAO report. As a “hidden danger” right below our feet, soil pollution turns out to be underestimated affecting everyone – humans and animals.
The FAO report warns that this dangerous phenomenon should be of concern worldwide. Its consequences are not limited to the degrading of our soils: ultimately, it also poisons the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. Soil pollution significantly reduces food security, not only by reducing crop yields due to toxic levels of contaminants but also by causing crops produced from polluted soils unsafe for consumptions both for animals and humans
The Global Symposium on Soil Pollution (GSOP18), aims to be a step to build a common platform to discuss the latest data on the status, trends and actions on soil pollution and its threatening consequences on human health, food safety and the environment.
The report prepared by FAO shows how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are deeply linked with the issue of addressing soil pollution. SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 3 (Good Wealth and Well-Being), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and SDG 15 (Life on Land) have all targets which have direct reference to soil resources, particularly soil pollution and degradation in relation to food security.
Furthermore, the widespread consensus that was achieved on the Declaration on soil pollution during the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-3, December 2017) is an obvious sign of global determination to tackle pollution and its causes, which mainly originate from human activities. Unsustainable farming practices, industrial activities and mining, untreated urban waste and other non-environmental friendly practices are amongst the main causes of soil pollution, highlights FAO’s report.
Facts and figures to note
The FAO report is an updated benchmark of scientific research on soil pollution and it can be a critical tool to identify and plug global information gaps and therefore advance a cohesive international response to soil pollution.
According to findings of the report, the current situation is of high concern. For example, the amount of chemicals produced by the European chemical industry in 2015 was 319 million tonnes. Of that, 117 million tonnes were deemed hazardous to the environment.
Global production of municipal solid waste was around 1.3 billion tonnes per year in 2012 and it is expected to rise to 2.2 billion tonnes annually by 2025. Some developing countries have notably increased their use of pesticides over the last decade. Rwanda and Ethiopia by over six times, Bangladesh by four times and Sudan by ten times.
The report also highlights that “the total number of contaminated sites is estimated at 80,000 across Australia; in China, the Chinese Environmental Protection Ministry, estimated that 16 percent of all Chinese soils and 19 percent of its agricultural soils are categorized as polluted”.
“In the European Economic Area and cooperating countries in the West Balkans” adding, “there are approximately 3 million potentially polluted sites”. While in the United States of America (USA) there are “more than 1,300 polluted or contaminated sites”. These facts are stunning and the international community needs to turn its urgent attention to preserve the state of our soils and to remediate polluted soils into concrete action.
The report also warns that studies which have been conducted, have largely been limited to developed economies because of the inadequacy of available information in developing countries and because of the differences in registering polluted sites across geographic regions.
This means that there are clearly massive information gaps regarding the nature and extent of soil pollution. Despite that, the limited information available is enough for deep concern, the report adds.
A growing concern
“The more we learn, the more we know we need cleaner dirt,” said FAO’s Director of Communication, Enrique Yeves, confirming the urgency of the UN agency to address the issue of soil pollution as soon as possible.
Concern and awareness over soil pollution are increasing worldwide. The report highlights the positive increase in research conducted on soil pollution around the world and fortunately, determination is turning into action at international and national levels.
Soil pollution was at the center of discussion during the Fifth Global Soil Partnership (GSP) Plenary Assembly (GSP, 2017) and not long ago, the UNE3 adopted a resolution calling for accelerated actions and collaboration to address and manage soil pollution. “This consensus” highlights FAO’s report, “achieved by more than 170 countries, is a clear sign of the global relevance of pollution and of the willingness of these countries to develop concrete solutions to address pollution problems”.
FAO’s World Soil Charter recommends that “national governments implement regulations on soil pollution and limit the accumulation of contaminants beyond established levels in order to guarantee human health and wellbeing. Governments are also urged to facilitate remediation of contaminated soils”.
“It is also essential to limit pollution from agricultural sources by the global implementation of sustainable soil management practices”. These recommendations need to be adequately addressed both at international and national levels, in line with the 2030 agenda.