Category: Environment

Bloodhounds and other sniffer dogs have been helping to track down villains for centuries — but when space is tight, Africa’s “sniffer rats” could be perfect for the job.In a boot camp deep inside Tanzania, an elite squad of tiny sniffer troops is being drilled for combat duty against transnational wildlife criminals.

Weighing in at just over a kilogram (2.2 pounds) each, several African Giant Pouched Rats are busy with intensive training in the city of Morogoro, west of Dar es Salaam.

Enticed by bananas, peanut butter and other tasty treats, the rats are being taught to detect the presence of illegal wildlife and timber products hidden in ships and smuggled out of Africa’s major ports to customers in Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

Though the rodents may end up with miniaturized GoPro cameras strapped to their heads, their most important weapon was bestowed by nature, in the form of an acute sense of smell. They can be trained to sniff out almost anything, from TNT explosives to early traces of tuberculosis in humans.

Their other main advantage is size. Unlike sniffer dogs, African Giant Pouched Rats can squeeze into very tight spaces — such as shipping containers stuffed with illicit hardwood timber, disguised beneath other products to throw customs officers off the scent.

Rats could also help in rhino poaching war

Future sniffer rats could also help to ferret out smuggled rhino horn. Earlier this year, South African Environment Minister Edna Molewa confirmed that more than 1,000 rhinos were killed in South Africa in 2017 — the fifth year in a row that has happened.

Read more:Malaysian authorities seize record haul of pangolin scales

In Morogoro, older relatives of the latest rat recruits have already proved their worth sniffing out abandoned landmines, as well as cases of human tuberculosis in a project pioneered by the Belgian non-profit organization Apopo.

Now the project is diversifying to see if the rats can be used to curb the multi-billion dollar flow of animals and plants by transnational crime syndicates.

Environmental crimes now worth billions

Studies by INTERPOL and the United Nations environmental agency UNEP suggest transnational environmental crimes — illegal logging, trafficking of wildlife, illegal fisheries, mining and toxic-waste dumping — have reached an annual value of somewhere between $70 billion (€56 billion) and $213 billion.

Just over a year ago, the South Africa-based Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) announced it was teaming up with Apopo on a pilot project aimed at detecting illegal pangolin and timber samples.

Cindy Fast, head of training at Apopo’s Morogoro laboratory, says several rats have completed the early phases of a rigorous training program, though progress was delayed by legal snags in obtaining pangolin scales to train the rodents.

Nevertheless, the rats are hard at work, learning to “signal” the difference between African ebony wood and up to 18 other items commonly used to mask its odor in shipping, such as coffee beans and textiles.

Teaching the rats

So how do you train a rat to find, and bring to the attention of a human handler, something fishy hidden in a shipping container? The bananas and peanut butter help, Fast explains.

Training starts very early for the baby rats, which are socialized to humans for one or two weeks before they are weaned from the mothers at six weeks.

Read more:Sanctuary saves anteaters maimed by poachers

The first phase involves “clicker training” where the young rats are taught to associate the delivery of a food reward with the sound emitted by a metallic clicker device held by the human trainer.

The trainers observe the rats closely as they scurry about a custom-built glass chamber. Inside the chamber there is a long metal tray with 10 separate compartments, all holding different target items, with small holes that allow the rats to get a good whiff of what they are searching for.

During the early stages of training, samples are placed in some of the 10 compartments – including samples of pangolin scales or ebony.

“The rats are trained using a standard learning and behavior principle of ‘shaping,’ whereby behavior is reinforced with a positive outcome,” says Fast. “For our rats, the positive outcome is a tasty food reward.”

To get this reward, there is a small aperture in the glass chamber which allows the trainer to feed them via a syringe.

“Once the rats reliably approach the feeding hole after the clicker is sounded, we then begin shaping their behavior within the training chamber.

“We gradually introduce non-target odors into the holes. The rats initially hold their nose over these holes, but when they fail to earn food for this behavior they gradually learn to rely on the smell of the item in the hole to predict when their response will earn them a reward.”

Some of the Apopo rats have also been trained to scratch the floor with their feet to provide a visible signal to the handler.

But training rats to find rhino horn is still a way off.

“It is too early to speculate about timelines for training with other wildlife contraband,” Fast says. “Before branching out we will need to complete the current laboratory, followed by the mock field environment proof-of-concept tests.

“Depending on the results from these phases, we might then conduct trials in a real field environment. This could take up to five years and must show promising results before expansion to other wildlife items would be reasonable.”

GoPro camera helmets

Endangered Wildlife Trust spokesman Adam Pires says customs officers will need to be consulted closely to simulate the real life practicalities of harbor searches.

“So far the rats are proving their ability to detect target odors and I have no doubt that this experiment will be successful, but the challenge will be around how they indicate a suspicious discovery,” says Pires.

One suggestion is attaching mini GoPro cameras to the rats, with a handler checking the live feed.

With these miniature sleuths are on their scent, wildlife smugglers will have to work much harder to cover their tracks.

Animal poetry is political, says Mikael Vogel. In his poetry collection “Dodos On The Run” he questions man’s responsibility for the mass extinction of animals in plain words.The poet and author Mikael Vogel has published a collection of poems, an “anti-bestiary”, as he calls it. In it, he collects animal species that have disappeared, often and especially thanks to humanity’s actions. This isn’t his first work on conservation. Vogel has already written a volume on industrial livestock farming. We asked him about the political significance of his work and about how much of an impact poetry can have in terms of environmental protection and conservation.

Global Ideas: Mr. Vogel, I assume that you would need a certain initial motivation to approach the subject of species extinction poetically. What was yours?

I found the topic of extinct animals via paleontology, essentially the treasure chest of past and lost life. After all, that’s what our planet is as well – aside from the abundance of animals and species that we know.

It started with many really bizarre animal species. And I knew immediately that this was like a photo negative of what we know as biodiversity. This is a great concept for a book and then I saw the role that man plays very clearly as the central theme. Since man has started to spread out on the planet there have been extinctions time and time again. And naturally that also quickly brings you to habitats, habitat destruction, agriculture and how that is all connected.

Paleontology isn’t necessarily something that everyone is passionate about. Were you already interested in that subject before?

No, I wasn’t. I stumbled into that via an accidental book find in a flea market and then it fell into place. Then I had the idea, I’m going to create an “anti-bestiary”, a bestiary of those that have disappeared. That’s when I started to collect material in a targeted way.

So you went out and sifted through libraries?

I started buying books immediately. I brought the library home, so to speak. I needed to do that, to buy every book, because later, I scribble them full of notes, add my own register, headwords, that I follow up on later, even years later. And that’s how this spread further and further.

What criteria did you use to find the animals? Were they particularly unusual, big, small, colorful species?

There was a kind of general aura but yes, some were in fact big, spectacular animals but also small ones – insects, butterflies. New doors opened time and time again. I also took great care to create diversity in the book, to have fish in there as well, for example. Also animals that many people initially don’t like, spiders, for example. When many people have aversions, then that sparks something, simply by virtue of a spider being the protagonist of a poem.

The book has a recurring structure. There are chapters and so-called time capsules. What is the reason for this structure?

The time capsules are dispersed across the book like a kind of grey thread, which is in fact printed white on grey. They deal with the evolution of mankind from the very earliest beginnings to key moments in history and all the way to the end. They give an outlook on the future. They are sort of a counterpoint to all the animal stories and also address man’s rise to power, which is behind all these stories of particular animals. Because there are only very few cases where the extinction stories were accidental. They were more likely tied to bounties, to targeted extermination, to declared enmity, competition for food and dominance over landscapes.

When we go through the book, where do we start? What chapters are there?

The book begins with historic stories of extermination. Then come the explorers. Many animal species were found and often quickly exterminated in conjunction with seafaring, with the search for new continents. But in the end, there is also a chapter that largely deals with animal species that are threatened with extinction. That relates to a kind of grey area between life and death, in other words, animal species that exist in such small populations that they are already genetically doomed to go extinct.

In practice, it is difficult to draw the line between the topics of ‘extinct animals’ and ‘animals threatened with extinction.’ Let’s take the northern white rhino: There are two of them left, the last male died recently and was no longer potent anyway. That rhino species exists but in a way, it already no longer exists. That may sound morbid but it is important in order to raise awareness for the issue. A few success stories, a few rediscoveries, that’s not enough.

How do you define the book yourself? Is it a volume of poems? A book of stories? A history book? Maybe even a textbook?

I think it will be interesting to see, how the readers will define it. I already noticed recently myself, that the book represents a great many things. It is a time capsule in and of itself because I went through great pains to keep the figures in the book up to date. At the same time, this book is a reflection of the status quo that was current in the spring of 2018 when it was published. At a later point in time, the tally between extinct and threatened species in the book will look different.

There isthe Vaquita, for example, which are projected to go extinct, as brutal as that is, in 2018. The most current figure out there estimates that there are 30 individuals left and that doesn’t even take losses due to hunting in the wild and bycatch from fishing for other species into account. In 20 years, the book will be a contemporary historical document, whether I like it or not.

Global Ideas reports on these same topics. We reported on the Saiga antelopes, we visited the orangutans in the rainforest several times and accompanied the animals there – in one of five essays at the end of the book, you describe the five mass extinction events that earth has already lived through and that we are currently in the midst of a sixth one…

… which is the first such event caused by mankind. So it’s an event of this kind caused by an animal species on this planet. That’s new.

So let’s talk about man. How can we make mankind aware of the significance of its role?

We sit here in cultivated, thickly-forested central Europe where everything looks like it’s okay. You don’t necessarily get the impression that any tree has ever fallen over, let alone was cut down. That’s deceptive. We have to realize that. During my research, I kept coming across frightening statistics. Indonesia still has three percent of its original forest cover. That’s just one example. And we’re the cause of that. That’s our furniture, those are our wooden spoons, those are our markets, that exploit resources there. Palm oil that ends up in our chocolate is a very important issue as well. And man should stop pillaging nature immediately.

But I get the sense that there is a kind of movement in that direction among people already, isn’t there?

We do experience that there is a certain amount of power starting to build on our side. For example, the power of the vegetarians and vegans. The fact that suddenly there are food products available that aren’t animal-based.

At the end of the book you also write that animal poetry is political. So, in the end, does your book even have political power?

I am convinced that animal poetry, if its focus is really on the animal, is inevitably political. Because in this globalized world, man has already marginalized animals so much, it has put them in such a head lock. Environmental pollution all the way to the farthest corners of the earth, global warming all the way to the seemingly most remote refuges. The finely tuned language of poetry needs to be voiced not just about animals but on behalf of them. I see the political power of poetry, potentially, in the precision of its language, which is vital for a truly productive discussion, I think. Especially in the German-speaking realm people still write far too casually and flippantly about the problems of the animal world.

I also wondered how you might want people to read your book. I jumped back and forth and didn’t read it chronologically.

That’s legitimate, that’s completely open. I think that a well-conceived poetry collection works when you jump back and forth as well as when you read it analytically but also when you read straight through it because, ideally, you can hardly pace yourself because you’re eager with anticipation. That’s up to everyone individually. But I think that is particularly true of the poetry part. I also have to say that I intentionally didn’t over-intellectualize the text and focus on the aesthetics of the writing because it’s about animals. That was important to me. I try to bring the individuality, the personality of the animals, their way of living, their habitats back to life. I didn’t want to paint over that with a human aesthetic or a poetic me.

In the book, many poems are accompanied by very beautiful, lively illustrations. How did that happen? Did you select them and who is the artist?

I was very torn about that for a long time. All in all, I worked on the collection for six years and initially I couldn’t imagine having it illustrated because contemporary illustrators often have a cynical take on animals or anthropomorphize them. And then my girlfriend came across the work of Brian R. Williams, who had drawn a series of eight extinct birds with the wonderful idea of dressing these extinct birds in fashion from the year when they became extinct. And that is an incredibly good trick to tie animals to human society, something that usually isn’t possible. During our work we realized more and more that we were two real nerds who had found each other and who had very similar ideas.

“Dodos On The Run” was published by Verlagshaus Berlin

Interview: Klaus Esterluß

Excerpt:

Carolina parakeet

Raspy

Voice, never held back

Babbler with orange-yellow head

Forehead red as if used for ramming strawberries

From the neck down, luminous green cascades…

The only parakeet of the North American east coast

In the depths of winter, at home in snow storms. Was toxic: cats

Died on eating it. Fought like a pest by plantation owners

Because it ate their seeds, plucked fruit, they used its devotion

For carnage, shot them squawking to their deaths and the others who’d flown by before them

Serially until the whole flock was wiped out.

The forests along the rivers with their old, hollow trees pulled out from

Beneath their toe phalanges

Its feathers, its stuffed body

Coveted as women’s hat pomp. Unpopular pet

Bit furniture, screeched unbearably, repeatedly ducked in water

In efforts to tame, remained wild regardless, refused to learn the human tongue

Was left-footed. The last Carolina parakeet called Incas

Died on 21 February 1918 in Cincinnati Zoo

In the same cage

Where four years earlier, Martha the last passenger pigeon

Passed away.

Pressure is building for the United Nations to recognize a clean environment as a human right, in order to give more protection to environmentalists. But changing these decades-old treaties could be an uphill struggle.In 1948, in the shadow of the crimes against humanity perpetrated during World War II, the United Nations adopted a universal declaration of human rights. Championed by former US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, it pledges UN countries to protect citizens’ rights to life, religion, movement, and health.

But the right to a clean environment, which many today would view as being essential to a good quality of life, is not included. That’s because the declaration, which has since become part of customary international law, was written well before environmentalism took off as a movement in the 1970s.

Now a United Nations expert is trying to change that. John H. Knox, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, asked the UN this month to recognize the human right to a clean environment.

“There can no longer be any doubt that human rights and the environment are interdependent,” Knox told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. “A healthy environment is necessary for the full enjoyment of many human rights, including the rights to life, health, food, water and development. At the same time, the exercise of other freedoms, including the rights to information, participation and remedy, is vital to the protection of the environment.”

Knox was presenting a report, called the “Framework Principles on Human Rights and the Environment”, which contains an exhaustive review of existing national laws and international agreements. The report calls on the Human Rights Council, and the UN as a whole, to adopt a global instrument calling a clean environment a human right.

The report proposes 14 framework principles, among them the requirement for states to ensure a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and for governments to protect those who are fighting for that right.

Existing definitions

“As Victor Hugo famously declared, it is impossible to resist an idea whose time has come,” Knox said. A majority of UN member countries already recognize the right in some way, and some, such as Bolivia, have even enshrined the right in their constitutions. Earlier this month, 24 Latin American and Caribbean nations signed an environmental rights pact recognizing the right.

But Knox says the absence of an equivalent at the global level has left this as an area of legal uncertainty, and means that there are no international laws to hold national governments to account. He wants the UN General Assembly to recognize the human right to a healthy environment when it meets for its general assembly in the Autumn. At its 2010 general assembly, the UN enshrined a right to water and sanitation.

A tool for citizens

Nick Meynen, an environmental justice campaigner with the European Environmental Bureau in Brussels, says having such an international recognition would help him pursue legal action around the world.

“This would reinforce future court cases, and strengthen court cases that are ongoing and that we support through our work,” he told DW. “For instance, there are class action cases in the Netherlands and Belgium about air pollution that would be helped.”

He notes that the Aarhus Convention, which was signed in 1998 between European countries and guarantees citizen access to information, justice and decision-making in environmental matters, has proven invaluable in helping citizens investigate environmental harm. But it’s only helpful if those crimes are recognized by the national government. Having an international agreement that environmental harm is a crime against human rights would make a big difference.

Meynen says even if the general assembly doesn’t take up Knox’s call this year, the report itself will likely be used in future court cases. “We see more and more engaged citizens who say it’s no longer tolerable to accept environmental harm,” he said. “For example in Belgium, a court case over air pollution was recently started by civilians. It wasn’t initiated by an NGO, just concerned citizens who say they’ve read what the level of air pollution is and it’s not acceptable. This kind of report is what they need to make their argument stronger.”

He adds that international recognition will also help protect environmental campaigners from threats of violence or arrest. A recent report from Global Witness found that 2016 was the deadliest year for environmental activists.

As UN Rapporteur for Human Rights and the Environment, Knox’s previous work is already being cited by courts. For instance, last month the Inter-American Court of Human Rights cited Knox’s previous testimony to the UN in a ruling equating environmental protection with human rights.

Next steps

Whether the general assembly will take up Knox’s cause will depend on how strongly the Human Rights Council backs his report. The Council is expected to adopt its official reaction to the report by the end of May.

Knox’s term will end this summer, before the next UN general assembly, due to term limits. There is already talk of selecting a high-profile replacement who can push through the effort to its final stages. Some have suggested that the actor Leonardo DiCaprio should take on the role.

But even DiCaprio might find that changing these decades-old international treaties is hard work.

While diesel cars increasingly look to be on the way out, another big polluter is often ignored: shipping. Will electric vessels, including the first e-barges, help the industry clean up its act?The world’s first 100-percent electric barges are set to start chugging between the busy ports of Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam in Belgium and the Netherlands by the end of the year, cutting down the numbers of diesel-powered trucks transporting goods.

Nicknamed the “Tesla ships,” the emissions-free boats are the latest offerings in a fleet of new electric and hybrid vessels in Europe. Port Liner, the Dutch Company behind the barges, claims they could revolutionize the polluting shipping and freight industry.

“It simply doesn’t make sense for us to build new ships with diesel engines,” Ton van Meegen, chief executive of Port Liner, a €100 million ($124 million) EU-supported venture, told DW. “Our vessels will be used for decades, and electric motors are clearly where the industry is headed.”

Read more: Think diesel cars are dirty? Try ships!

Construction of five barges, which can carry up 24 containers each, starts in March 2018. Powered by batteries charged with carbon-free energy, the vessels are expected to be on the water by the end of this year.

Although they’ll initially be manned by a crew, they are designed to be autonomous in the long term, and will take 23,000 freight trucks off the roads, the company says.

Cleaning up the shipping sector

Ships, especially those out in international waters, commonly burn bunker fuel — the dirtiest form of fuel. The emissions flowing out of their smoke stacks include high levels of nitrogen and sulphur oxides (NOx and SOx), which are linked to asthma, lung cancer and heart disease.

Maritime transport is responsible for about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the European Commission. While other sectors are anticipated to be able to reduce their emissions, in shipping, that’s expected to increase sharply.

Until recently, shipping has been largely absent from discussions on how to slash air pollution and carbon dioxide, or CO2.

Now, policy-makers are slowly taking action.

The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency regulating the shipping industry, has established a rule to limit the amount of sulphur in shipping fuels to .5 percent, down from 3.5 percent, starting in 2020.

Read more: Hoping for a fresh sea breeze aboard a cruise ship? Better hold your nose!

Research published in February 2018 in the journal Nature estimated this will reduce deaths related to shipping pollution by around a third, and ship-related childhood asthma cases by more than half. The latter currently stands at around 14 million cases annually.

It’s a move the world’s main shipping organization, the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), says it supports. ICS secretary general Peter Hinchliffe told DW that it also supports CO2 emissions reductions in the sector in line with the Paris Agreement.

Electric batteries: A viable option for global shipping?

Stricter regulations, coupled with production of lighter and more powerful batteries, has sparked what Lucy Gilliam — an expert on aviation and shipping at Brussels-based nongovernmental organization Transport and Environment — dubbed an “energy revolution.”

“Around Europe there is a wave of recent developments changing the (shipping) sector at a fast pace,” she said. “We need to bust the myth that batteries are too heavy or don’t have enough capacity to go far. In recent years, this has changed significantly.”

On short journeys, batteries don’t tend to add additional weight compared to traditional fossil fuel-powered ships, Gilliam said.

For example, to decarbonize the ferry between Dover and Calais, the battery would make up around 1 percent of the weight of the ship. “And that is nothing in the context of the amount of trucks and containers a ferry can take,” added Gilliam.

Read more: Diesel emissions kill. What is the car industry going to do about it?

While improved battery technology has helped the new generation of electric European ventures get afloat, long-haul, ocean-going vessels currently do not have the option of docking regularly to plug in small batteries — meaning that they are unlikely to become completely electrified in the near future.

“With current limitations on technology, it seems that electrification will be limited to small craft undertaking short, ferry-type voyages,” said Hinchliffe, adding that pressure on the shipping sector to reduce to zero emissions should be used as way to encourage research and development into clean propulsion.

New measures

Groups such as Transport and Environment say more should be done to spur on electric-powered vessels. One obstacle is taxes, which are currently widely levied on electricity, but not on more-polluting marine fuels.

Meanwhile, the globalized nature of the shipping industry means that ports are in competition with one another. That makes them reluctant to press ahead with green port schemes — such as taxing ships which run on dirtier fuels — or imposing stricter rules on the emissions of docked ships.

But electric vessels are nonetheless making waves, particularly in Scandinavian countries. A medium-sized car ferry, the MS Ampere, took to the seas off western Norway in early 2015. Ferry operator Scandlines also runs battery-diesel hybrids between Germany and Denmark.

Read more: Is the savior battery nigh?

According to Gilliam, electrification of short distance routes in Europe is inevitable. But in the longer term, the group is even more optimistic that fossil fuels will become a thing of the past across the economy.

“We think that everything will be electrified,” said Gilliam (adding that aviation is a likely exception).

“Then, it will just be a question of where that energy comes from.”

The revelation from a new global survey into microplastics in bottled water serves up a bitter irony. What we drink may well be contaminated. Possibly from the bottles themselves.Advertisements for bottled water tend to play on themes of purity and healthy living. If sales figures are anything to go by, many of us seem to be buying into that. The global industry is worth €119 billion ($147 billion) a year.

But original research and reporting by the global journalism organization Orb Media, and shared with DW, muddies the association.

The first of its kind on a global scale, the research tested bottled water from 11 brands bought at 19 locations in nine countries around the world for microplastics. The contaminant was identified in 93 percent of samples — in sometimes greatly varying quantities.

In a world where, according to forecasts by online statistics portal Statista, we will be drinking 391 billion liters of bottled water in 2017 — up from 288 billion liters in 2012 — the study begs the question: Is consuming such tiny plastic particles safe?

That’s a tough question to answer. Despite the ubiquity of microplastics in the environment, toxicologists are still in the early stages of figuring out their potential threat to human health.

Read more:

-Germans slow to bin plastics habit

We don’t yet know, says Rolf Halden, director of the Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University, how many of these particles actually reach our bloodstream.

Many of these plastic particles will be too big to penetrate so deeply into our bodies. But if some were small enough to pass through the gut, “there would be concern about physical invasion of tissue and the chemical load associated with the plastics,” Halden told DW.

Of mice and man

Describing microplastic as a “very challenging emerging contaminant,” Heather Leslie Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology expert at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam likens plastics and the chemicals in them to a bowl of spaghetti in which the noodles are the polymer chains, and chemical additives the sauce in between them.
“Depending on the recipe, you can have some chemicals in plastic that are toxic, and in fact a lot of ‘substances of very high concern (SVHCs)’ are associated with plastic products.”

She’s also concerned by what is known asparticle toxicity.

“If tiny particles, including plastics, make their way to a tissue in your body, they can cause what’s called oxidative stress, which can lead to chronic inflammation.” That, in turn, is now understood to play a major role in the onset of a number of chronic diseases, Leslie explains.

Read more:

-Plastic is junk food for coral

Albert Braeuning, a toxicogenomics expert at the German Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), has been analyzing the effect of microplastic on mice. His team fed the animals huge doses of different sized pieces of microplastic for 28 days, and are now studying the effects of these particles on mouse tissues.

“As far as we have proceeded with the analysis of the samples, we have not seen anything adverse yet,” he states.

Nonetheless, he stresses that further research is necessary to assess the “human situation.”

Compiling a big body of evidence, Leslie says, will be a long process, just as it was with smoking and climate change. “It sometimes takes decades to figure it all out.”

Mixed bag of results

The Orb study was supervised by Sherri Mason, a leading microplastics researcher at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who also managed a previous investigation by the organization into microplastics in tap water.
Her team injected each of the 250 bottles with Nile Red, a dye that adheres to oily materials — such as plastics — and filtered the water to 1.5 microns (0.0015 millimeters), which is smaller than a human red blood cell.

They found a per-liter global average of 10.4 particles in the 100-micron or 0.10-millimeter range. That is about the width of a human hair.

Using a laser light technique to analyze these larger particles, the scientists were able to read their molecular signature and confirm they were indeed looking at plastics.

But they recorded a much higher number of even-smaller particles, which they also believe to be plastic.

Using specially designed software to count these particles, they revealed extreme variations between bottles — even those from the same source. While some showed low to zero readings, others revealed hundreds or even thousands of particles.

The highest number of microplastic particles the researchers recorded in a single liter was in excess of 10,000.

Their findings led them to conclude we could be drinking an average of 314 of these smaller particles per liter. Because they could not analyze them in the same way as the larger particles, the researchers cannot entirely rule out that other contaminants could be in the mix.

“As a scientist, I’d say yes there is a possibility. Is it highly probable? I don’t think so,” Mason told DW. “One of the questions would be: What else would you expect there to be in water? It’s definitely not water, it’s not minerals you might expect to be finding, because those don’t absorb Nile Red.”

Drinking the bottle with the water?

Researchers don’t yet know where the contamination is coming from.

Among the plastics Mason did positively identify were nylon, polyethylene terephthalate (PET — typically used for plastic bottled drinks) and a 54-percent incidence of polypropylene, which is widely used to make bottle lids.

Microplastic even showed up in the samples they tested in glass bottles.

Read more:

-EU unveils plan to make all plastic packaging recyclable by 2030

Her findings align with the results of similar research conducted by Darena Schymanski of the Chemical and Veterinary Analytical Institute in Münsterland earlier in 2018. Using a different technique, she studied the prevalence of microplastic particles in bottled water in Germany.

“We found polyethylene terephthalate [PET] and polypropylene in the water,” Schymanski told DW. “Those are the polymers that the bottles and the caps are made of.”

An issue for the manufacturers

Andrew Mayes, senior chemistry lecturer at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, who is familiar with techniques involvingNile Red and who reviewed Orb’s findings, hopes they will advance the debate around the environmental impact of our packaging habits.

“Studies like this make people aware that while plastic is a wonder material, we need to use it and dispose of it with care and common sense,” Mayes told DW. “I think it switches the onus onto the manufacturers.

In response to Orb’s findings, Nestlé tested eight bottles from three locations. The results, the company said, did not show “microplastic particles beyond trace level.”

A Nestlé spokesperson told DW they were “ready to collaborate with others to further develop the robustness and standardization of testing methods.”

German bottled water producer Gerolsteiner said it has long “paid close attention” to microplastics and ensures its water is “regularly tested, both internally and by renowned laboratories.”

“No traces of microplastics have been detected in our sources in the course of these tests,” a Gerolsteiner representative said, adding that the findings were an opportunity to continue examining their processes.

But for toxicologists such as Halden, solving the microplastics problem runs deeper than method and process.

“The consumer has a role in communicating that they do not want to continue using materials we know to be sub-par based on today’s standards of how things should be compatible with the environment and with human life.”

“We are mass-producing yesterday’s chemistry,” he concluded.

*Clarification
Since publication PepsiCo has clarified that Epura is a proprietary brand of GEPP, which holds exclusive rights to PepsiCo products in Mexico.

Reporting in conjunction with Dan Morrison and Christopher Tyree of Orb Media. The full Orb Media report can be found atwww.orbmedia.org

A new study by WWF predicts drastic consequences for animal species around the world if temperatures keep rising — even if pledged limits to global warming are met.Global warming will threaten up to 50 percent of the world’s animal species, according to a study recently published by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Working with the University of East Anglia and the James Cook University, the nongovernmental organization examined 35 so-called priority places around the world, which are home to some of the planet’s most exceptional ecosystems and habitats.

These include biodiversity hot spots such as the Amazon basin and Madagascar.

If temperatures continue to rise in these regions as predicted, local wildlife will be severely threatened, the study concluded.

Almost 50 percent of animal species are at risk of extinction in those places by 2080 if global temperatures increase by 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit).

Even reaching the goal of keeping global temperatures under a 2-degree Celsius rise over pre-industrial levels as determined by the Paris Agreement will still have harm wildlife: almost 25 percent of species in priority places are still at risk under such a scenario, according to the study.

No escape

Around the world, animals such as the African elephant or the giant panda could vanish from their natural habitats.

But plants, amphibians and reptiles face an even greater struggle for survival, as they have a harder time escaping the effects of climate change.

“Species reorganize with the climate,” WWF spokesman Jeff Price told DW, “but they do that at different rates. Birds, for example, deal with the effects of climate change reasonably well.”

The study makes a distinction between species who have the capacity for biological dispersal — that is, the ability to migrate from one site to another — and those that cannot.

If global temperatures increase by 4.5 degree Celsius, 13 percent of migratory birds are at risk of local extinction, compared to 74 percent of amphibians, which are unable to move as far.

However, even those species that are able to move between different sites might face hindrances. “That’s why it’s best to try and keep things intact as they currently are,” says Price.

Gerhard Haszprunar, director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich, thinks the study’s findings are plausible.

But he points out that even more species would be considered at risk if ocean habitats were also taken into account.

The rate of species extinction is already alarmingly high, Haszprunar confirmed to DW. He sees this as not just a direct result of climate change, but also linked to deforestation and intenstive agriculture.