8 March 2022. Pollution | Plastics
Tiny increases in pollution levels are bad for your brain. Moving towards an international plastics treaty.
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1: Tiny increases in pollution levels are bad for your brain
We know that pollution has a significant set of effects on physical and mental health. The effect of pollution on cognition and cognitive performance is also striking.
I shared with my son a piece on the effect of CO2 levels on performance (a little more on that lower down) and he sent me back an undated piece by the Stripe founder Patrick Collinson on the effects of particulates on productivity, among other things. (Which may be more evidence than Collinson doesn’t think in the same way as other Silicon Valley successes, perhaps because he grew up in Ireland.)
Collinson’s piece focuses on particulates—PM2.5—and runs through a whole lot of research on their effect on performance. None of it is good: here are a few of them.
An OECD paper from 2019, for example,
estimates "that a 1 µg/m³ (a millionth of a gram per cubic meter of air) increase in PM2.5 concentration (or a 10% increase at the sample mean) causes a 0.8% reduction in real GDP that same year. Ninety-five per cent of this impact is due to reductions in output per worker, which can occur through greater absenteeism at work or reduced labour productivity."
Chess players play less well on polluted days:
"We find that an increase of 10 µg/m³ raises the probability of making an error by 1.5 percentage points, and increases the magnitude of the errors by 9.4%. The impact of pollution is exacerbated by time pressure.
Politicians use less complex words and language on polluted days.
A high-pollution day, defined as daily average PM2.5 concentrations greater than 15 µg/m³, causes a 2.3% reduction in same-day speech quality. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to the removal of 2.6 months of education."
And apparently, baseball umpires also make more mistakes on more polluted days.
It’s worse than this, of course. We know that poorer people tend to grow up in more polluted areas, and that it has long term effects on their educational performance. A lot of these particulates come from vehicle tyres and brakes. It’s one of the equity arguments for reducing traffic levels in cities.
On CO2 levels, Noah Briers’ observes that once CO2 levels go above 1,000 parts per million, learning performance really drops off (he’s geeky enough to carry a CO2 meter around with him).
(Picture: Noah Briers. He was on a plane at the time. This level of CO2 is not good.)
The basics of CO2 are simple: there is a base outdoor level that tends to hover a little above 400 ppm. Since we exhale CO2, the indoor level above that number is a good indicator of how much outside air is flowing through. The closer the number is to the outdoor level, the more the air is being changed... (T)here’s also a direct effect of CO2 on our brains. It seems to make us worse at thinking. While more research still needs to be done, multiple studies have shown cognitive declines as CO2 levels break 1,000 ppm.
The impact was found by a Harvard study to be statistically significant. Briers’ self-help tip: Take a break, open the doors (and windows, if you can). And, I guess, remember to carry a CO2 meter in your pocket.
2: Moving towards an international plastics treaty
It’s not often that good news gets buried by events, but that seems to be what’s happened to agreement at last week’s meeting of the United Nations, which has agreed for the first time to start negotiations on a global Treaty on plastic pollution.
(A standing ovation for the resolution. Photo: UNEP)
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and WWF, which have campaigned for a plastics treaty, summarised it like this:
The mandate agreed by UN member states opens the door for a legally binding treaty that deals with the root causes of plastic pollution, not just the symptoms. Critically, this includes measures considering the entire lifecycle of plastics, from its production, to product design, to waste management, enabling opportunities to design out waste before it is created as part of a thriving circular economy.
Obviously, the amount of plastic we’re producing globally is already huge—400 millions tonnes per year—and this is projected to double by 2040. Global plastic production was 2 million tonnes a year in 1950.
The agreement at the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi—agreed by representatives from 175 countries—was described by UNEP’s Executive Director Inger Anderson as the most important environmental agreement since the 2015 Paris climate accord. WWF went further: it says the agreement is the most significant since the 1989 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.
It’s easy to hear the phrases “start negotiations” and “United Nations” and assume that nothing is going to happen for years, so it’s worth noting that the timescale for reaching agreement is quite fast:
The resolution... establishes an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), which will begin its work in 2022, with the ambition of completing a draft global legally binding agreement by the end of 2024. It is expected to present a legally binding instrument, which would reflect diverse alternatives to address the full lifecycle of plastics.
And it’s also easy—watching the carve-outs and special provisions that come with the COP process—to assume that there’s going to be lots of that kind of horse-trading as well. But it seems not:
“Let it be clear that the INC’s mandate does not grant any stakeholder a two-year pause. In parallel to negotiations over an international binding agreement, UNEP will work with any willing government and business across the value chain to shift away from single-use plastics, as well as to mobilise private finance and remove barriers to investments in research and in a new circular economy,” Andersen added.
It’s also worth sharing here the summary of some of the impacts of plastics on climate change, health, and the environment, from the UNEP site:
- Exposure to plastics can harm human health, potentially affecting fertility, hormonal, metabolic and neurological activity, and open burning of plastics contributes to air pollution.
- By 2050 greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastic production, use and disposal would account for 15 per cent of allowed emissions, under the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C (34.7°F).
- More than 800 marine and coastal species are affected by this pollution through ingestion, entanglement, and other dangers.
- Some 11 million tonnes of plastic waste flow annually into oceans. This may triple by 2040.
On the other hand, it says,
A shift to a circular economy can reduce the volume of plastics entering oceans by over 80 per cent by 2040; reduce virgin plastic production by 55 per cent; save governments US$70 billion by 2040; reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent; and create 700,000 additional jobs – mainly in the global south.
UNEP marks its 50th anniversary this year—it was founded in 1972–and looking at the coverage of the event on UNEP’s website it was impossible not to get a sense that this was an emotional moment for delegates. The passing of the resolution prompted a standing ovation—see the photo at the top of the piece—before delegates hugged each other.
(Photo: UNEP)
The four page text of the resolution can be read here.
Ukraine notes
A note by Alexei Sorokin on Medium argues that the most unexpected effect of the war in Ukraine has been the speed of the exodus of international businesses from Russia. Sookin is a Russian living in the United States. It comes with a striking graphic that looks like a particularly impressive edition of one of those “all our clients’ logos on one page” slides that you see in agency creds decks:
This is mind-blowing. One week and all these companies left Russia. They’ve spent decades building their businesses, brands, and franchises. Now they are gone... many are private companies. No one sanctioned them not to do business in Russia. But they’re leaving the country like it’s a plague. And there is now a network effect. If you don’t jump the ship, well, you’re left on the sinking ship. And it’s been just a few days.
This scale of change seems likely to have some effect, especially on Russia’s urban middle class. No matter how much some of Putin’s colleagues dream of an autarkic Russia.
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