EU-DIGEST

The growing worldwide love affair with larger, heavier Sports Utility Vehicles has all but wiped out the motor industry’s gains in fuel efficiency over the past 20 years

Read more at: 
It’s time to recognise that SUVs are the big bad villains of vehicle air pollution | Business Post

Good news for the environment! The Netherlands will ban a number of single-use plastic products from July 2021, in an effort to protect our beaches and oceans.

Read more:
The Netherlands to ban many single-use plastics by next summer

T
he European Commission has adopted a new circular economy action plan with measures for the entire life cycle of products, which it says will strengthen the EU's economy, empower consumers and protect the environment.

The package of initiatives presented on Wednesday (11 March) sets out a range of actions in those economic sectors where circularity could have a bigger effect - including electronics and ICT, plastic and textile, packaging, batteries, construction and buildings, and food.

"The linear model of 'take-make-use-dispose' has reached its limits as it pushes us to a resource crisis," said the commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries, Virginijus Sinkevičius.

"As Europe is not rich in natural resources, [the] circular economy will strengthen the immunity of our economy from geopolitical challenges," he added.

As the core of the strategy, the commission will propose new legislation by 2021 to ensure that all products placed on the EU market are designed to last longer, and are easier to reuse, repair and recycle.

Read more: EU declares war on 'throw-away culture'

A disaster created by BIG OIL and BIG SODA killing mankind

Every human on Earth is ingesting nearly 2,000 particles of plastic a week. These tiny pieces enter our unwitting bodies from tap water, food, and even the air, according to an alarming academic study sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, dosing us with five grams of plastics, many cut with chemicals linked to cancers, hormone disruption, and developmental delays. Since the paper’s publication last year,

Sen. Tom Udall, a plain-spoken New Mexico Democrat with a fondness for white cowboy hats and turquoise bolo ties, has been trumpeting the risk: “We are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic each week,” Udall says. At events with constituents, he will brandish a Visa from his wallet and declare, “You’re eating this, folks!”

With new legislation, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020, Udall is attempting to marshal Washington into a confrontation with the plastics industry, and to force companies that profit from plastics to take accountability for the waste they create. Unveiled in February, the bill would ban many single-use plastics and force corporations to finance “end of life” programs to keep plastic out of the environment. “We’re going back to that principle,” the senator tells Rolling Stone. “The polluter pays.”

The battle pits Udall and his allies in Congress against some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet, including the oil majors and chemical giants that produce the building blocks for our modern plastic world — think Exxon, Dow, and Shell — and consumer giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever that package their products in the stuff. Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic cigarette butts in the environment every year. And it combines the lobbying and public-relations might of all three.

Americans have occasionally crusaded against “problem plastics” — scapegoating packing peanuts, grocery bags, or drinking straws for the sins of our unsustainable consumer economy. We’ve been slow to recognize that we’re actually in the midst of a plastic pandemic. Over the past 70 years, we’ve gotten hooked on disposable goods and packaging — as plastics became the lifeblood of an American culture of speed, convenience, and disposability that’s conquered the globe. Plastic contains our hot coffee and frozen dinners. It is the material of childhood, from Pampers to Playmobil to PlayStation 4. It cloaks our e-commerce purchases and is woven into our sneakers, fast fashion, and business fleece. Humans are now using a million plastic bottles a minute, and 500 billion plastic bags a year — including those we use to bag up our plastic-laden trash.

But the world’s plastic waste is not so easily contained. Massive quantities of this forever material are spilling into the oceans — the equivalent of a dump-truck load every minute. Plastic is also fouling our mountains, our farmland, and spiraling into an unmitigatable environmental disaster. John Hocevar is a marine biologist who leads the Oceans Campaign for Greenpeace, and spearheaded the group’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

Increasingly, his work has centered on plastics. “This is a much bigger problem than ‘just’ an ocean issue, or even a pollution issue,” he says. “We’ve found plastic everywhere we’ve ever looked. It’s in the Arctic and the Antarctic and in the middle of the Pacific. It’s in the Pyrenees and in the Rockies. It’s settling out of the air. It’s raining down on us.”


Read more at: How Big Oil and Big Soda Kept the Plastics Crisis a Secret for Decades - Rolling Stone

More than 200 million gallons of toxic sewage – enough to fill 320 Olympic-sized swimming pools – spilled into Fort Lauderdale's waterways over the past three months due to breaks in the city's aging pipe system, according to a report Monday.

Note EU -Digest; Local Fort Lauderdale government, which clearly neglected keeping the infrastructure up-to-date, will now have to invest millions to do so, in addition to having to absorb the cost for litigation, the potential of polluted waters from local waterways also polluting  Fort Lauderdale beautiful beaches and lost tourist revenues etc.

Read more at:
https://spacecoastdaily.com/2020/02/over-200-million-gallons-of-toxic-sewage-spills-into-fort-lauderdale-waterways/

he Trump administration is set to scrap protections for America's streams and wetlands, repealing Barack Obama's Waters of the United States regulation.

The move, expected Thursday, will dismantle federal protections for more than half of wetlands and hundreds of small waterways in the US.

The White House says the change will be a victory for American farmers.
But critics say the change will be destructive - part of Mr Trump's wider assault on environmental protections.

Read more at: Trump rolls back US water pollution controls - BBC News

Last year road traffic accounted for 17 percent of the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted in the Netherlands, according to Statistics Netherlands. The total CO2 emissions from road traffic was 2 percent higher in 2018 than in 2017 and 28 percent higher than in 1990. Passenger cars accounted for 62 percent of the CO2 emissions in road traffic.

Read more at:
https://nltimes.nl/2019/11/15/road-traffic-responsible-17-co2-emissions

Graveyards: A toxic pollution problem

Link TV  recently reported on how toxic graveyards really are.

Yes indeed, death is a messy business. In America alone, 1.6 million tons of cement and over 870,000 gallons of embalming fluid — commonly containing formaldehyde — are buried along with 2.5 million caskets every year.

“What you have here is a landfill … a toxic landfill,” says Glen Ayers of the Green Burial Committee as he looks around a traditional graveyard in Massachusetts.

Proponents of natural burial want to reduce the pollution and resource waste associated with funerals, which also includes burying masses of hardwood and steel.

One solution is to use eco-friendly biodegradable coffins made out of cardboard or even banana leaves. Campaigners also hope to increase the number of natural burial sites, where plots blend in with the natural surroundings.

There are currently fewer than 40 in the US.

Maybe it is time for people to start writing in their "final will and testament" that they want their "final farewell" to be a more eco-friendly one....and you will be doing a good deed for humanity, even after you have died.

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