Eye-Catching Designs Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles
The company sells a range of eco-friendly items like leggings, rash guards, and board shorts that are made using recycled post-consumer plastic bottles. There are currently 16 causes represented by distinct marine-life patterns, from whale shark research and invasive lionfish removal to sockeye salmon monitoring and abalone restoration.
One such organization is Get Inspired, a nonprofit that specializes in ocean restoration and environmental education. Get Inspired founder, marine biologist Nancy Caruso, says supporting on-the-ground efforts is one thing that sets Waterlust apart, like their apparel line that supports Get Inspired abalone restoration programs.
"All of us [conservation partners] are doing something," Caruso said. "We're not putting up exhibits and talking about it — although that is important — we're in the field."
Waterlust not only helps its conservation partners financially so they can continue their important work. It also helps them get the word out about what they're doing, whether that's through social media spotlights, photo and video projects, or the informative note card that comes with each piece of apparel.
"They're doing their part for sure, pushing the information out across all of their channels, and I think that's what makes them so interesting," Caruso said.
And then there are the clothes, which speak for themselves.
Advocate Apparel to Start Conversations About Conservation
Waterlust's concept of "advocate apparel" encourages people to see getting dressed every day as an opportunity to not only express their individuality and style, but also to advance the conversation around marine science. By infusing science into clothing, people can visually represent species and ecosystems in need of advocacy — something that, more often than not, leads to a teaching moment.
"When people wear Waterlust gear, it's just a matter of time before somebody asks them about the bright, funky designs," said Waterlust's CEO, Patrick Rynne. "That moment is incredibly special, because it creates an intimate opportunity for the wearer to share what they've learned with another."
The idea for the company came to Rynne when he was a Ph.D. student in marine science.
"I was surrounded by incredible people that were discovering fascinating things but noticed that often their work wasn't reaching the general public in creative and engaging ways," he said. "That seemed like a missed opportunity with big implications."
Waterlust initially focused on conventional media, like film and photography, to promote ocean science, but the team quickly realized engagement on social media didn't translate to action or even knowledge sharing offscreen.
Rynne also saw the "in one ear, out the other" issue in the classroom — if students didn't repeatedly engage with the topics they learned, they'd quickly forget them.
"We decided that if we truly wanted to achieve our goal of bringing science into people's lives and have it stick, it would need to be through a process that is frequently repeated, fun, and functional," Rynne said. "That's when we thought about clothing."
Support Marine Research and Sustainability in Style
To date, Waterlust has sold tens of thousands of pieces of apparel in over 100 countries, and the interactions its products have sparked have had clear implications for furthering science communication.
For Caruso alone, it's led to opportunities to share her abalone restoration methods with communities far and wide.
"It moves my small little world of what I'm doing here in Orange County, California, across the entire globe," she said. "That's one of the beautiful things about our partnership."
Check out all of the different eco-conscious apparel options available from Waterlust to help promote ocean conservation.
Melissa Smith is an avid writer, scuba diver, backpacker, and all-around outdoor enthusiast. She graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and sustainable studies. Before joining EcoWatch, Melissa worked as the managing editor of Scuba Diving magazine and the communications manager of The Ocean Agency, a non-profit that's featured in the Emmy award-winning documentary Chasing Coral.
These types of emissions that result from startups, shutdowns or malfunctions are often referred to as "excess" or "upset" emissions and are particularly pronounced during times of natural disasters, as was the case with Hurricane Harvey.
However, as we document in a newly published study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, they also occur regularly during the routine operation of many industrial facilities, sometimes in large quantities. And, even if unintended or unavoidable, the pollutants released during these events are in violation of the U.S. Clean Air Act (CAA).
With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA) now revisiting the rules regarding these air toxics, our study shows how significant they are to public health—and how historically they have not been systematically tracked across the country or regulated comprehensively.
Excess Emissions in Texas
Our study examines the occurrence of excess emissions in industrial facilities in Texas over the period from 2002 to 2016. We focused on Texas because, unlike nearly all other states, it has established comprehensive reporting requirements. The state collects data on so-called hazardous air pollutants that cause harm to people exposed to them, such as benzene, as well as substances called criteria pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides that contribute to the formation of ozone.
As a general rule, states set limits to industrial air emissions based on provisions in their State Implementation Plan (SIP), which is their strategy for meeting CAA requirements. The EPA in turn is responsible for ensuring that each state's SIP is drafted in accordance with the CAA.
The CAA requires sources of air pollution to achieve continuous emissions reductions, which in essence means companies need to install and maintain equipment to limit the release of pollutants that happen during routine operations.
Excess emissions occur when pollution abatement systems—such as scrubbers, baghouses, or flares that curtail emissions before they are released—fail to fully operate as the result of an unexpected malfunction, startup or shutdown. That is, a facility fails to maintain continuous emissions reductions, thereby exceeding its permit limits.
Although one might assume that such occurrences are rare, we found that excess emissions in Texas are frequent, sometimes large, and likely result in significant health damages for individuals living in communities near where these emissions are released.
Specifically, there are four important takeaways from our study.
First, excess emissions represent a sizable share of permitted (or routine) emissions. In the case of the natural gas liquids industry, excess emissions amounted to 77,000 tons over the period 2004-2015, representing 58 percent of the industry's routine emissions for that pollutant. Refineries emitted 23,000 tons of excess emissions (10 percent of their routine emissions of SO2) while oil and gas fields released 11,000 tons (17 percent of their routine emissions of SO2).
Second, the distribution of excess emissions is highly skewed. While thousands of excess emissions events occur every year in Texas, the top 5 percent of events release more pollutants than all the other events combined. In extreme cases, excess emissions events can release vast amounts of pollutants in a very short period of time. In 2003, a Total oil refinery in Port Arthur emitted 1,296 tons of sulfur dioxide within 56 hours, due to a power outage caused by a lighting strike. That was almost twice the amount of the total sulfur dioxide that refinery emitted that year from its routine operations.
Third, several industrial sectors account for a disproportionate amount of excess emissions. Facilities in just five sectors—natural gas liquids, refineries, industrial organic chemicals, electric services and oil and natural gas fields—emit about 80 percent of all excess emissions from industrial facilities in Texas.
Moreover, a few facilities within each sector are responsible for the vast majority of excess emissions. For example, the top six oil refineries are responsible for 70 percent and 77 percent of the excess emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide, respectively, released from all 30 Texas refineries.
Finally, excess emissions have important health effects. Using a model that links pollution to mortality, we estimate that the health damages attributable to excess emissions in Texas between 2004-2015 averaged $150 million annually. These estimates are certainly not comprehensive as they only consider damages from premature mortality due to particulate matter (PM) emissions caused by the emission of sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides.
The model does not account for the direct damage from other pollutants or from nonfatal, acute health events such as asthma attacks. As such, our estimate can be considered a lower bound.
Beyond Texas
The data we analyzed in our study reveal the magnitude of the problem caused by excess emissions. Yet, it is important to remember that they only capture the situation in Texas. We know very little about excess emissions and their trends over time at the national level. That's because Texas is one of just a few states (the others being Louisiana and Oklahoma) that systematically track and make public information on these type of pollution releases.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has gone as far as to implement a system that requires facilities to publicly report excess emissions events within 24 hours of their occurrence, information that the TCEQ then makes available on its website.
Although Texas is unique in its reporting requirements, excess emissions events are common elsewhere, as the watchdog group the Environmental Integrity Project has documented in a series of reports.
Excess Emissions Are Underregulated
The EPA, after decades of leaving excess emissions outside of its regulatory focus, made a concerted effort to update its approach during the final years of the Obama administration.
Prompted by a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club, the EPA issued a State Implementation Plan (SIP) call in 2015, asking states to revisit the way they regulate excess emissions. The agency found that certain SIP provisions in 36 states were " substantially inadequate to meet Clean Air Act (CAA) requirements."
This means that industrial facilities may have been regularly surpassing the limit of their permitted pollution limits, in part because of these excess emissions. But because of state agency exemption provisions, it could be the case that these facilities would not always be penalized. In other words, the EPA determined that many states had, as a matter of policy, often failed to treat excess emissions as violations and potentially shielded offending companies from paying fines.
The EPA is now revisiting its policy as part of the Trump administration's broader efforts to scale back many EPA regulations and decisions during the Obama era. Given the frequency, magnitude, and important adverse effects for public health, the EPA's ultimate decision on how states should treat excess emissions is consequential.
In addition, much is still to be learned about the magnitude of the excess emissions problem across the country. If an effective regulatory framework is to be designed to reduce them, it is imperative that more states begin tracking excess emissions events in a detailed and systematic way, following the example set by Texas.
Why Climate Change Is Worsening Public Health Problems https://t.co/fA6gJI3k1H #climatechange #publichealth @NRDC… https://t.co/RbQYlSoC6u— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1516985903.0
Reposted with permission from our media associate The Conversation.
By the time Southerland left the EPA in 1996, he was "frustrated and ticked off," he said, because the numbers he had helped develop were being misused. The original aim had been to paint a broad-brush picture of pollution. Instead, the numbers—meant to represent average emissions from industrial activities—were incorporated into permits stipulating how much pollution individual facilities could release. This happened despite EPA warnings that about half of these sites would discharge more than the models predicted. "These factors were not intended for permits," said Southerland, now retired and living in Cary, North Carolina.
The number of emission factors used by the EPA since Southerland's time has proliferated and stands at 22,693. The agency itself admits most are unreliable: It rates about 62 percent as "below average" or "poor." Nearly 22 percent aren't rated at all. About 17 percent earned grades of "average" or better, and only one in six has ever been updated. There is a slew of common problems, such as poor accounting for emissions from aging equipment.
The upshot: in some cases, major polluters are using flawed numbers to calculate emissions of substances such as benzene, a carcinogen, and methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Regulators at times are flying blind. The factors color everything we know about air quality and many of the decisions the EPA and state environmental agencies make, from risk assessment to rulemaking.
In an email, an EPA spokeswoman told the Center for Public Integrity that the agency has been working on the problem for a decade. "EPA believes it is important to develop emissions factors that are of high quality and reliable," she wrote.
Some experts, however, say the agency hasn't done enough. The unreliability of the numbers has been flagged over a period of decades by the EPA's own internal watchdog and other government auditors. "This is what tells you what's being put in the air and what you're breathing," said Eric Schaeffer, former head of civil enforcement at the EPA and now executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group. "You don't want those numbers to be wrong."
Accuracy Questions
Emission factors are based on company and EPA measurements as well as external studies. They are plugged into equations to estimate total emissions from industrial activities, such as the burning of coal in boilers.
As early as the 1950s, regulators in places like Los Angeles were using emission factors to try to pinpoint the origins of dangerous smog episodes. The numbers allowed them to avoid "time-consuming, expensive testing programs and extensive surveys of individual sources," according to a 1960 paper by the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District.
In 1965, the U.S. Public Health Service—which regulated air pollution at the time—released its first comprehensive list of factors, a document the agency would label "AP-42" in a 1968 update. The EPA, created two years later, kept revising the estimates as they became more widely used in emission inventories depicting pollution levels and sources around the country.
The EPA knew early on there were problems with the numbers. In 1989, for example, the Office of Technology Assessment—a now-defunct, nonpartisan science adviser to Congress—reported many U.S. metropolitan areas had not met their goals for controlling smog-forming ozone in part because of inaccurate emission inventories. In 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, Congress gave the agency six months to make sure all emissions contributing to ozone formation were assigned up-to-date, accurate factors, and directed the EPA to review the numbers every three years thereafter.
The EPA missed both deadlines. It has failed to do at least some of the three-year reviews. It claims to have created all the necessary ozone-related factors, but questions about their accuracy remain.
For decades, government watchdogs, including the EPA's Office of Inspector General, have pointed out deficiencies in the factors, which drive actions ranging from enforcement cases to the drafting of regulations. "We believe the status of emission factor development … is a significant weakness that impedes achievement of major air program goals," the IG wrote in a 1996 report. The EPA's dependence on industry studies because of funding constraints could result in factors that minimized pollution, it warned. The U.S. General Accounting Office—now the Government Accountability Office—reported in 2001 that polluters rely on the estimates even though "facilities' actual emissions can, and do, vary substantially from the published factors." The EPA's IG came back with a targeted reproach in 2014, questioning the validity of factors used to estimate methane emissions from some pipelines.
Still, there was little movement. Whereas emission factors are recognized as crucial tools in understanding air quality and underpinning inventories, they tend to be forgotten. "That foundation is buried to such an extent that it's not often appreciated," said David Mobley, who worked on emission factors in the 1990s. "The urgency is rarely there."
Test Case in Houston
Accurate pollution data matters. Consider what happened in the ozone-plagued city of Houston, a hub of oil refining and chemical manufacturing.
The city had been using emission inventories to guide its ozone-control strategy. Air monitoring by researchers in 2000 found levels of volatile organic compounds—highly reactive ozone precursors, such as benzene, known as VOCs—were 10 to 100 times higher than what had previously been estimated. The study—conducted by what was then the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the EPA and more than 40 other public, private and academic institutions—singled out as culprits VOCs such as ethylene, a flammable gas used mainly in the production of plastics.
Houston, it turned out, had focused on controlling the wrong emissions from the wrong sources to lower its ozone levels, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University. The city changed course, expanding VOC monitoring and developing rules to reduce emissions. Ozone production rates dropped by up to 50 percent in six years, Cohan and his colleagues found in a follow-up study. The study showed that reliance on emission factors alone is a bad idea, Cohan said. "We need scientists to measure these pollutants in the air to find out how much is really being emitted," he said.
The underestimation problem surfaced at individual facilities as well, including Shell's 1,500-acre petrochemical complex in the Houston suburb of Deer Park. A study begun by the City of Houston and the EPA in 2010 showed levels of benzene wafting from one Shell tank were 448 times higher than what the relevant emission factor had predicted. The discrepancy led to an EPA enforcement action; in a consent decree, Shell agreed to pay a $2.6 million fine and spend $115 million to control pollution from flaring—the burning of gas for economic or safety reasons—and other activities. Shell did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokeswoman told the Houston Chronicle in 2013 "the provisions of the settlement are consistent with Shell Deer Park's objectives and ongoing activities to reduce emissions at the site and upgrade our flaring infrastructure."
Despite the findings of these studies and others, the EPA didn't update emission factors for the U.S. refinery and petrochemical sector until 2015, seven years after Houston had petitioned the agency to do so and two years after it was sued by environmental justice groups.
Unreliable Methane Estimates
The low-balling of pollution isn't limited to toxic chemicals. Many emission factors used to estimate releases of methane—a potent greenhouse gas associated with oil and natural-gas development—are "far too low," said Robert Howarth, an ecology and environmental biology professor at Cornell University. Identifying how much methane these operations discharge can help scientists calculate the impact of natural gas—which in 2016 displaced coal as the nation's biggest source of electric power generation—on global warming. This is crucial to preventing "runaway climate change," Howarth said.
Much remains unknown. A 2015 study sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund found methane releases from oil and gas production and processing in the Barnett Shale Formation in northern Texas were 90 percent higher than what the EPA's Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions had estimated.
About a third of the factors used to estimate pipeline leaks and other natural-gas emissions in the most recent inventory, for 2015, are based on a 1996 study by the EPA and an industry group then known as the Gas Research Institute. The EPA's IG found in 2014 "there was significant uncertainty in the study data," meaning the EPA's assumptions on the amount of methane that spews from pipelines "may not be valid."
The harm caused by faulty estimates extends beyond oil and gas. An emission factor designed to estimate ammonia releases from poultry farms, for example, "is probably far too low" according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project. These emissions contribute to problems like algae blooms, which can spread rapidly and kill marine life in waterways like the Chesapeake Bay.
'Pandora's Box of Problems'
The EPA, according to its spokeswoman, has begun executing a plan to improve the science that underlies emission factors and review the estimates more frequently. Among the changes: some companies now must report pollution data electronically to the agency.
The Trump administration proposed slashing the EPA's budget by 31 percent for fiscal year 2018, although Congress has so far extended existing funding levels through a series of short-term resolutions. Progress on emission factors will hinge on "available resources," the EPA spokeswoman wrote in an email, declining to specify a deadline for the project.
The agency said it does not intend to limit the use of emission factors to the purpose for which they were originally intended—to inform pollution inventories. That means, for example, that the numbers will still be used in permits.
Many in industry are fine with that. When the EPA asked in a 2009 Federal Register notice for suggestions on how to improve the system, companies from electric power generators to auto manufacturers argued for the status quo, saying emission factors were sometimes their only data option. Trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council argued their members should not be penalized if the EPA discovered a deficient factor had caused a permit to underestimate pollution. API said it worried that additional industry data supplied to the EPA to help it improve the numbers "could be misused for enforcement or other purposes." Neither group responded to requests for comment.
Public health advocates, on the other hand, want more. Some companies game the system to avoid EPA permitting fees and civil penalties, said Neil Carman, clean air director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club in Austin. "We don't know what the emissions really are," he said. "It's a real Pandora's box of problems."
Carman and other advocates say they understand emission factors will have to be used in some circumstances, and that some types of pollution can be estimated with reasonable accuracy. They also maintain, however, that air monitoring should be more widely deployed. "Where you can do direct monitoring of emissions, that should be required," said Schaeffer, of the Environmental Integrity Project.
Schaeffer faults the EPA for giving some companies an out. It allows operators of power plants, for example, to choose between using continuous monitoring to measure fine particles, or a combination of quarterly testing and emission factors. Some of these plants already have monitoring systems installed, Schaeffer said, but "it's easier to mask noncompliance using emission factors."
Shining a 'Bright Light' on Pollution
California's Bay Area Air Quality Management District changed its approach after studies showed leaks from oil refineries in the area—known as fugitive emissions—were likely underrepresented in emission factors. "We decided, based on that information, that we needed additional ways to better identify fugitive emissions and to shine a bright light on those fugitive emissions," said Eric Stevenson, the district's director of meteorology, measurement and rules.
In 2016, the district urged refineries to install "open path" monitoring systems—which use beams of light to detect the presence of gases like benzene—and make the data available to the public in real time. Chevron installed such a system on the perimeter of its refinery in Richmond, California, in 2013.
The company didn't respond to specific questions about the monitoring but said its focus "on running the refinery efficiently and investing in new technologies" has significantly reduced air pollution since the 1970s. Denny Larson, executive director of the Community Science Institute - CSI for Health and Justice, an environmental group that helps the public test for pollution, said the system in Richmond shows levels of chemicals in the air at a given moment and can alert residents to emission spikes that can trigger asthma attacks and other serious health problems.
"It's showing lots of pollution has been flying under the radar that's extremely toxic and problematic," Larson said. "We can prove what we've always known."
Reposted with permission from our media associate The Center for Public Integrity.
From President Trump's first day in office through the end of July, the U.S. Department of Justice collected a total of $12 million in civil penalties as part of 26 civil lawsuits filed against companies for breaking pollution control laws. This was less than the $36 million in penalties in 34 cases in Obama's first January through July; $30 million in 31 cases under the same period during George W. Bush's administration; and $25 million in 45 cases during Clinton's first half year.
"President Trump campaigned on a promise of 'law and order,' but apparently law enforcement for big polluters is not what he had in mind," said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former director of civil enforcement at EPA. "The early returns show fewer cases with smaller penalties for violations of environmental law. If this drop-off in environmental enforcement continues, it will leave more people breathing more air pollution or swimming in waterways with more waste."
This analysis is based on EIP's examination of federal consent decrees in EPA civil enforcement cases referred to the U.S. Justice Department for prosecution that resolve violations of the Clean Air Act, Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. It does not include Superfund cases, which may be examined by EIP in a future report.
Reduced environmental enforcement harms public health because pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides contribute to the formation of fine soot-like particles known to cause premature deaths from heart attacks and lung disease.
Pollution reduction information is not available for all lawsuits. But according to available case information and formulas used by EPA, the pollution reductions from five civil environmental cases filed by the Trump administration so far will prevent at least 22 premature deaths per year. This is less than the estimated 229 premature deaths annually avoided by the emission reductions required in eight cases filed during President Obama's first six months, and 618 deaths per year avoided by four cases at this point in George W. Bush's administration.
Estimated Annual Emissions Reductions and Premature Deaths Avoided
The data for the Trump administration's record so far is just a snapshot and trends vary over time. Large future cases could potentially shift these results. "The actions that Justice Department and EPA take over the next year will indicate whether the disappointing results so far are all we can expect," Schaeffer said.
The numbers so far show that President Trump's Justice Department has collected about 60 percent less in penalties than polluters had paid by on average this time in the first year of Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The cases this year are smaller, requiring much less spending on cleanup, and resulting in fewer measurable reductions in pollutants that end up in our air or water.
Below is a chart comparing the number of civil lawsuits and penalties during President Trump's first six months compared to the same period of time for the three previous presidents.
Total Environmental Cases Lodged (Civil) and Penalties Paid
The disparity between administrations is more significant when inflation is taken into account. For example, the $25 million in civil penalties paid from January through July of 1993, during the Clinton administration, is equivalent to more than $42 million in 2017 dollars (compared to the $12 million collected during a comparable time period in the Trump administration).
Beyond civil penalties, EPA also estimates the value of another outcome of environmental lawsuits: "injunctive relief." This means how much money violators will spend to install and maintain the pollution control equipment needed to reduce emissions and comply with environmental standards. This equipment includes scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide from smokestacks or treatment systems that decontaminate wastewater before it is released to a river. EPA has been making these injunctive relief cost estimates for the last two decades.
The value of court-approved "injunctive relief" has fallen to $197 million during President Trump's first January through July, compared to $1.3 billion under the same period of time at the beginning of President Obama's first term, and $710 million under the first half year of George W. Bush's first term, federal records show.