Artist covers sculpture in plastics as sign for delegates at pollution summit
Delegates to the treaty talks pass by the sculpture daily in a reminder of their responsibility to solve the plastic pollution crisis. The talks are scheduled to conclude on Thursday.
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Benjamin Von Wong, a Canadian artist and activist, designed the nearly six-metre tall sculpture called the Thinker's Burden and built it with a team.
It is his take on the famous sculpture by Auguste Rodin, The Thinker in Paris. There is a male figure in deep thought, like Rodin depicted.
Benjamin Von Wong hopes the entire sculpture will be covered in plastic waste by the time the summit concludes (Jennifer McDermott/AP)
But instead of sitting atop a rock, Mr Von Wong's figure sits atop Mother Earth while cradling a baby and clutching plastic bottles. A strand of DNA intertwines them to highlight the health impacts of plastic pollution.
With the help of volunteers, Von Wong is adding plastic waste to the installation over the course of the negotiations to reflect the growing cost of inaction.
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He climbed a ladder on Monday to reach the top of the sculpture and weave plastic bottles through the DNA. He put a plastic toy car in front.
'By the end of this week, we should have a sculpture almost completely drowned in plastics, however, the hope is, a strong and ambitious plastics treaty means that we can solve this problem once and for all,' he said.
About 3,700 people are taking part in the talks, representing 184 countries and more than 600 organisations. They are aiming to craft the first global, legally binding treaty on plastics pollution.
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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Buoyant, the size of a lentil and almost impossible to recover: how nurdles are polluting the oceans
When a Liberian-flagged container ship, the MSC Elsa 3, capsized and sank 13 miles off the coast of Kerala, in India, on 25 May, a state-wide disaster was quickly declared. A long oil slick from the 184-metre vessel, which was carrying hazardous cargo, was partially tackled by aircraft-borne dispersants, while a salvage operation sealed tanks to prevent leaks. But almost three months later, a more insidious and persistent environmental catastrophe is continuing along the ecologically fragile coast of the Arabian Sea. Among the 643 containers onboard were 71,500 sacks of tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles. By July, only 7,920 were reportedly recovered. Millions of these plastic balls have continued to wash ashore with the fierce monsoon storm surges that demolished a stretch of palm-fringed beach in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala's capital, in June. They lie scattered by the sea-facing Catholic church at Vettukadu and in tide lines on the beach, where giant jute bags of them, gathered by volunteers, await collection. Lightweight, buoyant and almost impossible to recover, they will circulate in moving sand and ocean currents for years, experts say. 'The nurdles haven't just polluted the sea – they've disrupted our entire way of life,' says Ajith Shanghumukham, a fish worker in the town. A fishing ban, imposed after the spill by local authorities in four Kerala districts, has since been lifted but fears over contamination have hit fishing communities already struggling with declining fish populations and the changing climate's intensifying storms. 'Very few people now venture out to sea because the local markets simply aren't buying fish,' says Shanghumukham. Those who do report nets full of nurdles and declining catches. 'People continue to worry about contamination,' Shanghumukham says. While 100,000 fishing families received compensation of 1,000 rupees (£8.50) from the state, this represented less than a week's income for most. 'The crisis has plunged many families into poverty,' he says. Nurdles, a colloquial term for the plastic pellets, are the raw material used for nearly all plastic products. Lentil-sized, at between 1-5mm, and thus potentially classifying as microplastics, or fragments smaller than 5mm, they can be devastating to wildlife, especially fish, shrimps and seabirds that mistake them for food. They also act as 'toxic sponges' attracting so-called forever chemicals such as PCBs and PFAs in seawater on to their surfaces, and also carry harmful bacteria such as E coli. 'When ingested by marine life, these pellets introduce a cocktail of toxins directly into the food web,' says Joseph Vijayan, an environmental researcher from Thiruvananthapuram. 'Toxins can accumulate in individual animals and increase in concentration up the food chain, ultimately affecting humans who consume seafood.' Microplastics have been found in human blood, brains, breast milk, placentas, semen and bone marrow. Their full impact on human health is unclear, but they have been linked to strokes and heart attacks. The spill's location and timing could not have been worse, Vijayan says. Nearly half of India's seafish are landed in the Malabar upwelling region, where the shipwreck happened. And Kerala's turbulent monsoon season, from June to August, which has hampered clean-up operations, is a time of great marine productivity, when rising nutrient-rich waters bring blooms of plankton, the foundation of the marine food web. Worryingly, following the Keralan spill, there have been reports of nurdles once again washing up on beaches in Sri Lanka, a reminder of the worst recorded plastic pollution spill in history when the X-Press Pearl container ship, carrying chemicals, caught fire and released 1,680 tonnes of nurdles into the sea off Colombo in 2021. The Kerala disaster, the latest in a series of pellet spills, has again exposed huge gaps in accountability, transparency and regulation in the plastics supply chain, environmentalists say. Dharmesh Shah, a Kerala-based plastics campaigner at the Centre for International Environmental Law, says: 'These spills expose the transboundary nature of pellet pollution, affecting countries regardless of their role in plastic production. 'They reveal a chronic lack of enforceable global standards across the supply chain – from production to transport – coupled with inadequate transparency, reporting and accountability.' Sekhar L Kuriakose, of the Kerala State Disaster Management Authority, estimates the clean-up could take up to five years. The state has filed a $1.1bn (£820m) compensation claim against MSC. The container shipping company MSC, which chartered the vessel, along with the owner, have filed a counterclaim, disputing jurisdiction and seeking to limit their liability. But the consequences of nurdle spills are being felt globally. In March, nurdles washed up on Britain's Norfolk coast after a container ship collided with a tanker in the North Sea. In January 2024, millions of pellets washed up on Spain's Galician coast. Communities can wait years for compensation. It took until last month for Sri Lanka's highest court to rule that the X-press Pearl's Singapore-based owners owed $1bn compensation for the 2021 sinking's 'unprecedented devastation to the marine environment' and economic harm. At least 445,000 tonnes of nurdles are estimated to enter the environment annually worldwide; about 59% are terrestrial spills, with the rest at sea. The number of big nurdle spills at sea is increasing, according to Fidra, a Scottish environmental charity. With plastic production expected to triple to more than 1bn tonnes a year by 2060, along with more frequent and intense storms, the threat is expected to grow, with some 2tn nurdles spilling into the environment a year. Yet no international agreements exist on how to package and transport nurdles safely, or even to classify them as hazardous. This week, delegates from more than 170 countries are meeting at the UN's plastic pollution talks in Geneva, in an effort to resolve deep divisions over whether plastic production will be included in a final treaty. Campaigners hope successful talks will allow a global approach to pellet loss, packaging, transportation and legal accountability. Amy Youngman, a lawyer at the Environmental Investigation Agency, says: 'Because of the biodiversity in the area, the Kerala spill is devastating. But coming four years after the X-Pearl Xpress, it was foreseeable.' One problem, she says, is that ships are not required to disclose they are carrying pellets. Another is the failure to recognise harm when spilled. 'They are not seen as hazardous or dangerous material so they are shipped like any other produce,' she says. Human error causes most spills, she says, adding that laws on handling and storing pellets could reduce spills by 95%. A research paper published in June co-authored by Therese Karlsson, a scientific adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, showed that plankton may well have been malformed after exposure to leached chemicals from plastic and burnt plastic debris from the X-Pearl Express. Of 16,000 chemicals in plastic, 4,000 are known to be hazardous. 'But for more than 10,000 of them we don't know the health impacts,' she says.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Buoyant, the size of a lentil and almost impossible to recover: how nurdles are polluting the oceans
When a Liberian-flagged container ship, the MSC Elsa 3, capsized and sank 13 miles off the coast of Kerala, in India, on 25 May, a state-wide disaster was quickly declared. A long oil slick from the 184-metre vessel, which was carrying hazardous cargo, was partially tackled by aircraft-borne dispersants, while a salvage operation sealed tanks to prevent leaks. But almost three months later, a more insidious and persistent environmental catastrophe is continuing along the ecologically fragile coast of the Arabian Sea. Among the 643 containers onboard were 71,500 sacks of tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles. By July, only 7,920 were reportedly recovered. Millions of these plastic balls have continued to wash ashore with the fierce monsoon storm surges that demolished a stretch of palm-fringed beach in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala's capital, in June. They lie scattered by the sea-facing Catholic church at Vettukadu and in tide lines on the beach, where giant jute bags of them, gathered by volunteers, await collection. Lightweight, buoyant and almost impossible to recover, they will circulate in moving sand and ocean currents for years, experts say. 'The nurdles haven't just polluted the sea – they've disrupted our entire way of life,' says Ajith Shanghumukham, a fish worker in the town. A fishing ban, imposed after the spill by local authorities in four Kerala districts, has since been lifted but fears over contamination have hit fishing communities already struggling with declining fish populations and the changing climate's intensifying storms. 'Very few people now venture out to sea because the local markets simply aren't buying fish,' says Shanghumukham. Those who do report nets full of nurdles and declining catches. 'People continue to worry about contamination,' Shanghumukham says. While 100,000 fishing families received compensation of 1,000 rupees (£8.50) from the state, this represented less than a week's income for most. 'The crisis has plunged many families into poverty,' he says. Nurdles, a colloquial term for the plastic pellets, are the raw material used for nearly all plastic products. Lentil-sized, at between 1-5mm, and thus potentially classifying as microplastics, or fragments smaller than 5mm, they can be devastating to wildlife, especially fish, shrimps and seabirds that mistake them for food. They also act as 'toxic sponges' attracting so-called forever chemicals such as PCBs and PFAs in seawater on to their surfaces, and also carry harmful bacteria such as E coli. 'When ingested by marine life, these pellets introduce a cocktail of toxins directly into the food web,' says Joseph Vijayan, an environmental researcher from Thiruvananthapuram. 'Toxins can accumulate in individual animals and increase in concentration up the food chain, ultimately affecting humans who consume seafood.' Microplastics have been found in human blood, brains, breast milk, placentas, semen and bone marrow. Their full impact on human health is unclear, but they have been linked to strokes and heart attacks. The spill's location and timing could not have been worse, Vijayan says. Nearly half of India's seafish are landed in the Malabar upwelling region, where the shipwreck happened. And Kerala's turbulent monsoon season, from June to August, which has hampered clean-up operations, is a time of great marine productivity, when rising nutrient-rich waters bring blooms of plankton, the foundation of the marine food web. Worryingly, following the Keralan spill, there have been reports of nurdles once again washing up on beaches in Sri Lanka, a reminder of the worst recorded plastic pollution spill in history when the X-Press Pearl container ship, carrying chemicals, caught fire and released 1,680 tonnes of nurdles into the sea off Colombo in 2021. The Kerala disaster, the latest in a series of pellet spills, has again exposed huge gaps in accountability, transparency and regulation in the plastics supply chain, environmentalists say. Dharmesh Shah, a Kerala-based plastics campaigner at the Centre for International Environmental Law, says: 'These spills expose the transboundary nature of pellet pollution, affecting countries regardless of their role in plastic production. 'They reveal a chronic lack of enforceable global standards across the supply chain – from production to transport – coupled with inadequate transparency, reporting and accountability.' Sekhar L Kuriakose, of the Kerala State Disaster Management Authority, estimates the clean-up could take up to five years. The state has filed a $1.1bn (£820m) compensation claim against MSC. The container shipping company MSC, which chartered the vessel, along with the owner, have filed a counterclaim, disputing jurisdiction and seeking to limit their liability. But the consequences of nurdle spills are being felt globally. In March, nurdles washed up on Britain's Norfolk coast after a container ship collided with a tanker in the North Sea. In January 2024, millions of pellets washed up on Spain's Galician coast. Communities can wait years for compensation. It took until last month for Sri Lanka's highest court to rule that the X-press Pearl's Singapore-based owners owed $1bn compensation for the 2021 sinking's 'unprecedented devastation to the marine environment' and economic harm. At least 445,000 tonnes of nurdles are estimated to enter the environment annually worldwide; about 59% are terrestrial spills, with the rest at sea. The number of big nurdle spills at sea is increasing, according to Fidra, a Scottish environmental charity. With plastic production expected to triple to more than 1bn tonnes a year by 2060, along with more frequent and intense storms, the threat is expected to grow, with some 2tn nurdles spilling into the environment a year. Yet no international agreements exist on how to package and transport nurdles safely, or even to classify them as hazardous. This week, delegates from more than 170 countries are meeting at the UN's plastic pollution talks in Geneva, in an effort to resolve deep divisions over whether plastic production will be included in a final treaty. Campaigners hope successful talks will allow a global approach to pellet loss, packaging, transportation and legal accountability. Amy Youngman, a lawyer at the Environmental Investigation Agency, says: 'Because of the biodiversity in the area, the Kerala spill is devastating. But coming four years after the X-Pearl Xpress, it was foreseeable.' One problem, she says, is that ships are not required to disclose they are carrying pellets. Another is the failure to recognise harm when spilled. 'They are not seen as hazardous or dangerous material so they are shipped like any other produce,' she says. Human error causes most spills, she says, adding that laws on handling and storing pellets could reduce spills by 95%. A research paper published in June co-authored by Therese Karlsson, a scientific adviser for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, showed that plankton may well have been malformed after exposure to leached chemicals from plastic and burnt plastic debris from the X-Pearl Express. Of 16,000 chemicals in plastic, 4,000 are known to be hazardous. 'But for more than 10,000 of them we don't know the health impacts,' she says.
The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
Footage shows diggers removing ‘disgusting' island of wet wipes from Thames
Footage shows diggers starting to remove a 'disgusting' bank of wet wipes that has built up along the River Thames in west London as part of a first-of-its-kind clean-up project. Plastic waste has gathered over recent years into a thick sludge along a 250-metre stretch of the river's southern foreshore by Hammersmith Bridge. Dubbed 'wet wipe island', campaigners from the charity Thames 21 have been calling for a major clean-up as well as a wider crackdown on plastic pollution as its volunteers collected more than 140,000 wet wipes from the area over eight years. Work to remove the estimated 180 tonnes of congealed wipes, led by the Port of London Authority (PLA) in collaboration with Thames Water, began on Monday and is expected to take up to a month to complete. Footage showed the arms of diggers plunging into the mud of what looks like a protruding river bank. But closer up, the machines could be seen scooping out chunks of mucky rubbish that included dangling bits of plastic and wet wipes. Plastic waste has settled in this slow part of the river after being flushed down toilets and released as part of untreated sewage by Thames Water during periods of heavy rain. Tires, a cone, items of clothing, plastic bags and pieces of taupe were also shown littering the shoreline and floating in the water against the backdrop of Hammersmith's scenic riverside pubs and homes. It is estimated that the wet wipe island is one metre deep in some places, covers an area equivalent to two tennis courts and weighs the same amount as 15 double-decker London buses. Once removed, the waste will go to landfills rather than being recycled due to the high levels of contamination. Grace Rawnsley, PLA director of sustainability, told the PA news agency: 'It is disgusting. 'It's unsightly, it's causing environmental harm and we don't think it should be here.' The wet wipes break down into microplastics and contaminate the environment with other types of bacteria, she said, adding: 'It's really important to get them out'. Asked why it has taken years to remove the island, Ms Rawnsley said: 'We're just as frustrated at the pace as everybody. 'We wish responsible bodies had acted sooner to deal with the issues, but this is a good opportunity.' The clean-up comes after the new Thames Tideway Tunnel recently started operating, with expectations that it will help to catch 250 tonnes of plastic waste a year. It is hoped the new so-called 'super sewer' will also help to reduce the amount of untreated sewage Thames Water dumps into waterways during wet or stormy weather as part of efforts to stop the system being overwhelmed. This sector-wide issue, caused by a lack of investment in ageing infrastructure, growing demand and climate impacts, has sparked public outcry. John Sullivan, Thames Water's head of its Tideway Integration Group, said: 'Now the Thames Tideway Tunnel is in operation, we will intercept 95% of the volume of water that goes into the river. 'It's only in the most extreme storms that we'll ever get an overflow now.' Asked why Thames has taken so long to act on the issue, he said: 'It would seem sensible to do this scale of a clean-up once the Thames Tideway Tunnel has gone into operation. 'Without it, we'd be coming back year on year in order to do the clean-up.' Challenged on why interim clean-ups were not carried out over the years to limit the breakdown of plastics, he said: 'This one clean-up is spending our customers' money more wisely, doing it once, assessing the impact and then coming back if necessary.' Alongside Thames21 and PLA, Thames Water is urging the public to dispose of wet wipes in the bin rather than flush them down toilets. 'They are a curse of the sewer system,' Mr Sullivan said. 'What we'd encourage our customers to do is only flush pee, poo and paper down the toilet rather than wet wipes.' The project is currently a standalone clean-up because of the size of the build-up in the area, but Mr Sullivan said the company is working with Thames21 to understand whether there are further sites to tackle. The three organisations are also urging companies to tackle the plastic waste they produce and have welcomed legislation currently progressing through Parliament to ban plastic in wet wipes. Liz Gyellye, communications manager at Thames21, said: 'We're arguing for systemic change. 'Of course (the clean-up) is part of the puzzle but it's not the whole puzzle. 'We want manufacturers to introduce alternatives to plastic wet wipes, we want water companies to invest in sewage infrastructure and we want consumers not to flush them down the loos and put them in the bin. 'And, of course, we want the Government to hurry up and introduce a ban on plastic in wet wipes.'
