China’s Forest Protection Efforts May be Taking Root

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 Contrary to previous reports, China’s efforts at protecting its forests appear to have been successful.
 

 The Asian nation’s forests are under growing global scrutiny because as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, it needs to reduce its emissions. Because forests absorb greenhouse gas emissions, and older forests absorb more emissions than newer forests, preserving, not merely replacing, forests is key.
 

 A recent study looked at China’s efforts in reducing deforestation impacted by China’s two forest-protection policies, the National Forest Protection Program (NFPP) and National Level Nature Reserves (NNRs). Using satellite and mapping data, the research, published
 <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.12561/full" target="_blank">
 earlier this year
 </a>
 in Conservation Biology, compares forest canopy levels inside and just outside of the protected areas. Researchers found that the deforestation rate in NFPP provinces has slowed dramatically.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/trees-taklamakan-desert.width-990_qvHcyrv.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Irrigation lines water trees on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China.
 
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 “Nobody had been able to do this before, because nobody could get the borders of the parks; they’re not publicized,” said researcher Douglas Yu, author on the study, who splits his time between the University of East Anglia in the UK and the Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences. “In every other country in the world, it’s something that you make a big deal out of. You publish maps everywhere and you say there are these wonderful parks. In China, anything that’s on a map is considered national sensitive information.”
 

 It took months for Yu and his team to get the borders, but once secured they used MODIS satellite imaging data to track changes in forest cover. Designed to detect vegetation, MODIS is a long-running satellite data series, making it particularly well suited to track changes over the ten year span, 2000–2010, that the study analyzed. It’s relatively low resolution, or large pixel size, is also a plus when surveying a landscape this large—it reduces computing time.
 

 Glimpsed from above, not much of China is green. Twenty-seven percent of China is desert compared to a global average of 17%; only 18% of China, is forested. The United States, which is roughly the same size as China, is 10% desert and 31% forested. The discrepancy between the two countries is due partly to differences in geography but also due to deforestation.
 

 By 1950, three waves of revolution had left China with only 5–8% forest cover. In the intervening years, governments have committed to reforestation, but “development always trumped environmental improvement,” said University of Washington anthropologist Stevan Harrell. “A big series of floods in 1998 is when they finally realized that they had to do something big.”
 

 That year, deforestation on the steep slopes above the upper Yangtze River lead to a series of devastating floods that lasted two and a half months. They killed 4,000 people and left tens of millions homeless. In fact, the NFPP and NNRs were originally developed not as mitigation against climate change, but against erosion.
 

 China’s efforts at staunching deforestation have had some hiccups. By some estimates 85% of the plantings on China’s “Great Green Wall,” a giant belt of trees planned to stretch 2,800 miles across north and northwest China to halt the advancing Gobi desert, have died.
 

 Increasingly, however, the focus is not on what’s happening inside of China, but outside.
 

 “There’s very little unsustainable cutting going on in China,” Harrell said. “The problem is that they’re importing soft woods from Russia, and hardwoods from the tropics, from New Guinea, and Indonesia and tropical Africa.”
 

 It’s a sentiment echoed by Tom Bregman, project manager of the Global Canopy Programme, which produces The Forest 500, a global ranking of influential companies, investors, and governments based on how much they contribute to or work to prevent deforestation.
 

 “China scores relatively poorly for their overall policy,” Bregman said, “due to a lack of strong procurement policy that protects intact forest landscapes and a lack of publicly-available laws or directives that seek to minimize the impact of their commodity imports on forests.”
 

 “As they struggle to restore their own forests but continue to build their wood products industry for domestic and foreign consumption,” Harrell said, “they’re exporting their deforestation.”
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikex/61761442/">
 Mike Locke/Flickr (CC BY-ND)
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Tiny bits of plastic are found in many personal care products.

800 Trillion Plastic Microbeads Go Down Drains Every Day

“Scrub away the stank,” promises a television commercial for a popular brand of men’s body wash after flashing a montage of questionable behaviors that would challenge even the most industrial cleaners. However, this cleanser doesn’t just send your dignity down the drain, it also sends microbeads, the tiny bits of plastic that are in myriad personal care products.


 Manufacturers use microbeads whenever soaps, toothpastes, face washes, or shavings creams need a bit of grit. Yet despite their utility, researchers in a
 <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.5b03909">
 recently published
 </a>

 Environmental Science and Technology
 
 article say that banning microbeads from personal care products could help protect the world’s waterways from a growing assault of plastic
 
 .
 

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 “Municipal wastewater systems were designed for our [bodily] waste and food waste, but they’re not engineered to handle tiny bits of plastics,” said Rebecca Sutton of the San Francisco Estuary institute. Upgrading waste treatment facilities to handle microbead waste would cost billions, and it wouldn’t necessarily be effective.


 “Studies of waste treatment facilities outfitted with tertiary treatment particle filters still find microbeads,” said Chelsea Rochman, lead author on the study.


 Roughly 8 trillion microbeads, enough to cover more than 300 tennis courts, are dumped into aquatic habitats across the United States daily. Another 800 trillion microbeads end up in sludge from sewage plants, after which it’s frequently spread on land as fertilizer. From there, runoff from rain can bring it to waterways.


 “It’s insane that we created a product designed to be litter,” said Blake Kopcho, campaign manager with the nonprofit 5gyres, which works to rid the world’s waterways of plastic waste.


 Although microbeads are only a small fraction of the plastic that ends up in the world’s oceans, their environmental impact bothers some scientists because they’re present in products that are designed to be poured down the drain. “This is why so many folks are focused on controlling plastic of the source,” Sutton said. “If we’re using less plastic and disposing of it properly, this won’t be so much of an issue.”

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 When plastic enters waterways, it attracts persistent pollutants like PCBs, which studies show can cause cancer and harm immune, reproductive, nervous, and endocrine systems in animals. PCBs may also affect humans in similar ways.


 As DDT and PCBs latch onto microplastics, they become biomagnified up the food chain. Microplastics are frequently eaten by small fish, which are then eaten by bigger fish, which in turn are eaten by top predator fish such as tuna, which in turn are eaten by humans. At each step, pollutants attached to them become more concentrated.


 The
 
 Environmental Science and Technology
 
 brief is not the first to call for a ban of microbeads in personal care products. A 2014
 
 Tulane Environmental Law Journal
 
 article also called for a ban with the authors stating that “microbeads release as water pollutants is an inevitable part of their lifestyle.” The authors said that the existence of biodegradable alternatives such as ground-up apricot kernels, crushed walnut shells, and dried coconut make microbeads unnecessary.


 Yet industry has resisted their eliminations. Industry-supported microbead bills, such as the one in Illinois that passed in 2014, ban some – but not all – microbeads. Specifically, the one in Illinois bans polyethylene microbeads but allows other for ‘biodegradable’ plastic microbeads to be used. The problem is that “biodegradable is not defined in the legislation,” Kopcho said.


 “Most compostable plastic is PLA” said Jenna Jambeck, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Georgia. PLA, or polylactic acid, is designed to biodegrade, or break down, in the relatively high heat of industrial composting facilities. “It’s unclear what they would do in a wastewater facility.”


 The Personal Care Products Council, which lobbies on behalf of the personal care product industry, did not reply to a request for comment.


 Countries ranging Canada to the U.K. are discussing bans, and earlier this month California passed a bill banning the sale of products containing plastic microbeads—even biodegradeable ones. Barring a governmental veto, it likely spells the ends of microbeads in personal care products in the U.S.—California is too large of a market for manufacturers to exclude from products that would otherwise contain microbeads, and special formulations for the state could be cost-prohibitive.


 “For most of human history, waste was biodegradable,” Jambeck said. “In the past 40 years, plastic production increased over 640%. It’s a big thing to adjust to culturally. We can’t just put our waste out there anymore and hope it goes away.”


 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jkarpala/3835825170/">
 Jeff/Flickr (CC BY-SA)
 </a>

Researchers say that banning microbeads––plastic bits used to add a little grit to soaps, face washes and toothpastes––from personal care products could help protect the world’s waterways from a growing assault of plastic.

Kendra Pierre-Louis

Articles

China’s Forest Protection Efforts May be Taking Root

800 Trillion Plastic Microbeads Go Down Drains Every Day

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