Note: this article has been translated to English using Google Translate and thereafter edited for English discrepancies.
In Chelyabinsk, a round table discussion will take place considering issues of interaction between the public, regulatory bodies and industrial enterprises to ensure the purity of the atmospheric air.
(Manila, Philippines; Vancouver, Canada; Gothenburg, Sweden): Sixty-nine shipping containers of illegally dumped Canadian trash set sail for home today after a six-year fight to get Canada to comply with the Basel Convention. In a joint statement, the EcoWaste Coalition, RightOnCanada, and IPEN described the historic departure of the reeking garbage from the Port of Subic north of Manila as a victory for the rule of law, morality and the environment.
BEIJING — In all likelihood, the enduring physical legacy of China’s internet boom will not be the glass-and-steel office complexes or the fancy apartments for tech elites.
New research from a network of anti-toxin NGOs and research centers in Europe, Africa, and Australia has indicated that people living or working around waste combustion sites, in cities in Ghana and Cameroon, are massively exposed to brominated dioxins, chlorinated dioxins, and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
In particular, Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in Eggs: Report from Africastates, “An adult eating just one egg from a free-range chicken foraging in Agbogbloshie area would exceed the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) tolerable daily intake (TDI) for chlorinated dioxins by 220-fold.”
Amidst growing concern about the impacts of plastic on the oceans, ecosystems, and human health, there’s another largely hidden dimension of the plastic crisis: plastic’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. This report examines each of these stages of the plastic lifecycle to identify the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions, sources of uncounted emissions, and uncertainties that likely lead to underestimation of plastic’s climate impacts.
The waste and pollution watch group EcoWaste Coalition today denounced the latest attempt to dump into the Philippines mixed plastic waste this time from Hong Kong, China.
The incident reinforces the call made by the group urging the government to formalize as soon as possible President Rodrigo Duterte’s marching orders issued last May 6 banning waste shipments from other countries.
In February 2019, under growing public and political pressure, the US EPA finally announced plans to address PFOS and PFOA, two toxic chemicals widespread in drinking water that are still unregulated in the US after decades of use. Instead of praise, the EPA announcement triggered anger after the public realized that the agency will conduct years of assessment before actually regulating them. US residents may be more incensed if they know that the rest of the world has already acted globally on these substances.
