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This story was originally published by the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.

Will and Julie Volpert have led white water rafting trips on Southern Oregon’s Rogue and Klamath rivers for over a decade for their company Indigo Creek Outfitters, out of the small town of Talent, Oregon. The rafting season, which extends from May to September, is a perfect time to be out on the river where snowpack-fed cold water provides respite from the region’s hot summer.

Or it would be perfect, if wildfire smoke weren’t a looming concern. 

“We’ve been in operation here since 2011, and almost every year there’s some smoke that comes in and is noticeable on our trips,” Will Volpert said in an interview. If people have flexibility, he recommends that they schedule a trip before the third week of July when the likelihood of smoke in the air is lower.

Customers frequently cancel in late July and August because of the smoke, especially for day trips. Federal data shows air quality tends to be more than four times worse on average in Jackson County, Oregon, during this period than earlier in the summer.

“We’ve gotten very used to saying, ‘Hey, it’s very likely going to be smoky on your trip. It might not be, but it could be.’” Volpert said. But as long as they’re not putting their participants at risk, Volpert said, they won’t cancel a rafting trip because of wildfire smoke.

Will Volpert poses with one of the rafts used on river trips for his company, Indigo Creek Outfitters. Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder

Running a business affected by wildfire smoke has become normal for the Volperts, but it hasn’t come without its personal toll. 

“I used to get very stressed out and paralyzed with the idea of losing our summer, which for us is, as the owners of this small business, our livelihood,” Volpert said. 

While Volpert says he’s learned to manage that anxiety, wildfire smoke is a frequent source of stress for many people living in rural communities. The smoke harms farms and recreation-based businesses, can be psychologically triggering for wildfire survivors, frequently drives residents indoors, and recent research showed it’s associated with increases in rural suicides.

Wildfire smoke has become a pervasive form of air pollution released from intensifying fires due to the warming effects of heat-trapping pollution and a litany of other environmental changes.

Southwestern Oregon experienced unhealthy air from wildfire smoke nearly 13 days each year on average from 2013 through the end of 2022 — up from one to two days on average from 1985 through 2012, according to a report by Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality that used data from the town of Medford, about 10 miles northwest of Talent where Indigo Creek Outfitters is based.

Smoke pollution exacerbates asthma, worsens infections, and contributes to a variety of other physical maladies. Tiny smoke particles move from lungs into bloodstreams and can directly affect brain health, with research out of the University of Montana connecting smoke exposure to the development of dementia. 

Its noxious effects on mental health, particularly on rural communities, tend to receive less discussion.

Hidden dangers in rural valleys

Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley is at the heart of a region synonymous with white water rafting, rock climbing, and other outdoor activities in the Klamath Mountains and Cascade Range. Vineyards and pear orchards dot the valley, and in the midsize town of Ashland at the valley’s south end, the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival boasts international recognition. 

All these activities hinge on good summer weather, and during the past decade, they’ve been disrupted by wildfire smoke, directly affecting wages and profits and reducing overall quality of life.

“In rural areas there’s likely more people whose livelihoods are based on the land and working outside,” said Colleen Reid, a health geographer and environmental epidemiologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who studies the health effects of wildfire smoke.

Wildfire smoke fills the air at an olive orchard on the North Umpqua River in Glide, Oregon, in September of 2020. Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder

In the valley, wildfire smoke settles more easily and often sticks around longer than it does in the surrounding mountains and plains. Atmospheric conditions often arise in valleys that keep smoke close to the ground, where its effect is the strongest. This can trigger more than physical ailments like asthma.

“We’re increasingly seeing mental health impacts,” Reid said. While early research focused on the effects of flames from wildfires, she said “There are some more recent studies where even individuals who were just affected by the smoke could have mental health impacts.”

By trapping people inside homes and forcing the cancellation of outdoor social events like youth sports, smoke can contribute to loneliness, domestic quibbling, and despair. 

A study published last fall in the science journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences linked smoke exposure with increases in suicides among rural populations, though not among urban ones.

“In rural areas, we find that smoke days are significantly associated with increases in suicide rates,” said David Molitor, a health economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research, which drew on 13 years of smoke and federal suicide data to track mental health effects. 

Because deaths from suicide are tracked by the federal government, they can be a useful measurement reflecting mental health, which is otherwise difficult to research and track. And that federal data shows that rural Americans are about a third more likely to die from suicide than those living in cities or suburbs. 

“I think what’s different with rural people is they have access to guns, and they’re much more effective at succeeding in their efforts,” said Joseph Schroeder, a disaster response veteran and former mental health extension specialist at the University of Kentucky with experience working at and running crisis hotlines for farmers and other rural residents. 

Suicide ideation often arises from desperate needs for financial aid and other help, more so than poor mental health. This puts residents of rural communities that have been hollowed out following closures of timber, manufacturing, and other employment-rich industries at greater risk.

“From my experience, the despair that has become suicidal ideation, or a suicidal threat, they’ve all come from conversations I’ve had with people who are calling me to get out of a situational problem — mostly financial,” Schroeder said. “It’s a poverty problem and it’s an isolation problem. And that looks differently in rural communities than it does in urban communities.”

The Almeda fire

Come smoke or shine, Indigo Creek Outfitters — Volpert’s white water rafting company in Talent — always operates. 

But on the morning of September 8, 2020, Volpert knew something was different about the wind whipping through the trees around his house outside of Phoenix, just three miles from Talent. The weather was so unusual he canceled the Upper Klamath rafting trip planned for that day. 

“That is literally the only time that I can remember ever pulling the plug on one of our trips,” Volpert said. A few hours after making that decision, Talent and Phoenix were engulfed in flames. 

A conncrete building that survived the Almeda Fire in Talent, Oregon, undergoes reconstruction in November 2023. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

The wildfire, known as the Almeda Fire, was the most destructive in Oregon history: About 3,000 buildings burned, most of them homes. Three people and many more animals died.

Analysis of weather station data shows the Almeda Fire broke out during a bout of fire weather — when conditions are persistently dry, warm, and windy. The area was in extreme drought at the time, setting up conditions conducive to an extreme wildfire once winds strengthened. It took more than a week for firefighters to extinguish the flames completely.

After surviving a wildfire that completely changed the lives of so many in the Rogue Valley, there’s an added layer of grief that comes with the smoke season. 

“For me, [smoke] causes a lot of anxiety,” said Jocksana Corona. The mobile home in Talent where she lived with her husband and two children burned down during the Almeda Fire. The family relocated to a suburban neighborhood in nearby Central Point, but haven’t been able to rebuild the kinds of strong community ties they had enjoyed in Talent. 

“My kids grew up in the Latino community [in Talent] where there were always kids on their bikes, people on the streets walking their dogs,” Corona said. “In our new community and our new neighborhood, we don’t have that. It’s like we don’t know anybody.” 

Even though Corona and her family were able to buy a house after losing their mobile home, she said three years later, they’re still not fully recovered. 

“We’re listed [by the state of Oregon] as a recovered family because we purchased the house and relocated,” Corona said. “But for me, for my own mental health and for my kids’ mental health, I wouldn’t say we’re recovered. I’m still experiencing triggers from the fire.”

Corona said she is bothered by the smoke in the air much more after her experience with the Almeda Fire, especially around its September anniversary. 

Smoke is a constant reminder for wildfire survivors of their own harrowing experiences, and the potential for it to happen again. 

“That grieving and that mourning is re-triggered by smoke season because it’s evident in the very air we breathe that their experience is not only real, but it hasn’t ended,” said Tucker Teutsch, executive director of Firebrand Resiliency Collective, a nonprofit created to support the area’s recovery from the Almeda Fire.

The nonprofit runs a peer support group that provides a safe grief space for Almeda Fire survivors to share recovery resources and talk through problems they’re having in the fire’s aftermath. The group has met weekly since the 2020 fire.

When clean air is impossible to find

In the Methow Valley, a rural region in north-central Washington state, a coalition of community members has been supporting each other during smoke seasons since the 2013 Carlton Complex Fire, which destroyed 500 buildings.

The community coalition, called Clean Air Methow, spreads awareness about air quality safety. It also supports people struggling with the mental health toll of living with smoke. 

A swing set at the Gateway Project in Talent, Oregon. The project provided more than 50 transitional housing trailers for people who lost their homes in the Almeda Fire. More than three years after the fire, people are still living in the trailers. Claire Carlson / The Daily Yonder

“With this mental health and wellness piece, what we often don’t explicitly acknowledge is the threat of what the oppressive, opaque, physical heaviness of being under this white smoke for a prolonged period of time is like,” said Elizabeth Walker, director of Clean Air Methow. 

“People kind of just say, ‘Oh, it’s so bad, so smoky, I hate it,’” Walker said. “But when we ask people to actually give the words of their experience, they use ‘oppressive, heavy.’ They feel depressed.”

The number one clean air recommendation is for people to stay indoors, but this can contribute to feelings of social isolation when it’s smoky, according to Walker. Indoor air isn’t always cleaner than outdoor air, either. Older homes without modern windows, doors, ventilation, and air conditioners can let in lots of smoke particles. 

“Make sure you’re indoors, but also make sure you’re indoors with a HEPA filter or an air filtration system,” said Erin Landguth, a University of Montana at Missoula scientist who researches the health effects of wildfire smoke exposure. Because buying and maintaining such systems is expensive, a “key difference” from cities is that rural residents may be less able to afford them.

Clean Air Methow has been advocating for “cleaner air shelters” in the Methow Valley to provide public spaces with better indoor air quality for community members to visit when it’s smoky out. They’ve also provided air purifiers to people living in homes that let lots of smoke in. 

Poor indoor air quality affects countless rural communities. 

At Southern Oregon University in Ashland, access to clean indoor air during smoke season is hard to come by. The college’s older buildings don’t have updated indoor ventilation, causing workers and students there to be exposed to toxic smoke particles.

Willie Long stands in front of a climbing wall at a Southern Oregon University climbing gym. Jan Pytalski / The Daily Yonder

“I’m lucky enough that the building I work in was built in, I think 2016 or something like that, and it has a great HVAC system,” said Willie Long, assistant director at the outdoor program and climbing center at Southern Oregon University. “I generally have pretty good air quality when I get to go to work, but it’s not like that for most people who work at SOU.” 

And when it’s smoky, colleges stay open. Southern Oregon University issued a policy in 2019 that states it will postpone all non-emergency strenuous activity, review filtration and HVAC systems, and “encourage the use of N95 filtration masks or equivalent for personnel outdoors” when air quality exceeds the rate deemed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous for everyone. 

Trauma and anxiety

Heidi Honegger Rogers spent 25 years working as a family nurse practitioner before shifting her focus as an academic at the University of New Mexico researching the health impacts of weather disasters and environmental change. She’s an active member with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. “Wildfire is a really intense and often traumatizing experience,” she said.

Though not everybody gets a diagnosis, Rogers said research shows that between a quarter and 60 percent of those directly affected by a wildfire will experience post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. About 1 in 10 people could still be affected a decade later, she said.

“Even after a trauma has dissipated and there’s no immediate emergency, the people stay in this agitated, super-alert state, which is characterized by anxiety,” Rogers said.

Smelling wildfire smoke or seeing another community burn can be triggering for those with PTSD, according to Rogers.

Smoke has become a trigger for Jocksana Corona, the former Talent resident who lost her mobile home in the Almeda Fire. She sought counseling after the fire to deal with her anxiety, in part because she didn’t want it interfering with her own work as a drug and alcohol counselor. 

“I knew my physical and emotional reactions to the smoke could interfere with my ability to help my own clients with their own struggles,” Corona said.

She went to a mental health counselor for six months who helped her process her anxiety. Corona encouraged her two children to seek counseling as well, but for her daughter, the experience wasn’t helpful. Most of the mental healthcare providers in the Rogue Valley are white and only speak English, which can be a barrier for nonwhite or non-English speaking patients. 

“I think that when it comes to mental health counseling for Latinos, it’s definitely lacking no matter whether you’re in Central Point or Medford, which are bigger towns,” Corona said. 

When Corona worked as a drug and alcohol counselor, she said she was one of just a handful of bilingual counselors in Jackson County — which includes Talent and Phoenix — and neighboring Josephine County. She had clients come from Roseburg, 100 miles away, seeking her bilingual services.

Trauma manifests itself differently in every person through experiences like sleep loss, chronic worry, and grief, Rogers said. “People can do okay for a little bit and then they can be triggered by something that goes into their brain and reminds them of this scary experience that they had.”

Stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness can manifest in declining physical health. “It degrades our immune response. We end up with more inflammation. We end up with more pain. We end up with more cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure,” Rogers said.

And for those not directly affected by wildfires, seeing infernos on the news and smelling smoke hundreds of miles away can serve as reminders that the climate is changing. Rogers said that can lead to senses of hopelessness and anger that corporations continue to pollute the atmosphere despite decades of warnings and mounting impacts.

One of the consequences of atmospheric pollution has been stark increases in the number of days each year when fire weather occurs across the U.S. and the world. Fire weather is marked by windy, hot, and dry conditions.

The region torched by the Almeda Fire sees three to six more days on average every year during the past decade when fire weather conditions are present, compared with four decades prior, analysis shows.

“We can have anxiety and fear and worry about any of those injustices that we’re seeing, or any of those losses that we’re seeing,” Rogers said.

Walker, the clean air educator with Clean Air Methow, said it can be helpful to remember that “smoke season doesn’t last forever” during smoky days.

“I think that living with wildfire smoke can become this really lovely reinforcement of mindfulness,” Walker said. “This is what it is right now, whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to change.” 

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached by dialing 988 and the Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Persistent wildfire smoke is eroding rural America’s mental health on Jan 7, 2024.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Cities and towns across the Mississippi River basin have always needed to weather the environmental disasters associated with living along a river.

The past few years have brought wild fluctuations between flooding and drought, bringing more stress to the communities nestled along the Mississippi’s 2,350 miles.

In the last five years alone, they’ve seen springtime flooding, flash flooding, significant drought, and low river levels, with opposite ends of this spectrum sometimes occurring in the same calendar year.

“When these rivers have disasters, the disaster doesn’t stay in the river,” said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative. “It damages a lot of businesses, homes, sidewalks, and streets; even broadband conduit and all kinds of utilities, mains, and water return systems.”

The cost of those damages can run into the millions, if not billions.

The River Des Peres in south St. Louis in December of 2023. The drainage ditch fills up with water during heavy rains and prolonged flooding. Eric Schmid / St. Louis Public Radio

One potential solution Wellenkamp encourages the 105 individual communities in his organization to consider is to work with, rather than against, the river. 

“Just about all of them have some sort of inlet into the Mississippi River that they’re built around,” he said. “Some of them are big and some of them are really small. But all of them need attention.”

It’s not a new idea, and many cities are already investing in nature-based solutions, such as removing pavement, building marshes, and making room for the river to flow. Now, St. Louis is looking to learn from Missouri’s neighbors in Dubuque, Iowa, on what the city can do with its River Des Peres. 

‘It’s just an eyesore’

“It’s just an eyesore,” said Beatrice Chatfield, 15, who was walking along the River Des Peres pedestrian and bike greenway with her mom, Jen. “There’s trash and debris and muck in it. It’s just all-around gross.”

It’s less of a river and more of a large concrete and stone-lined drainage channel that winds from the Mississippi through the urban landscape before disappearing beneath St. Louis’ largest park, Forest Park. It then reemerges further west in the suburb of University City.

“It’s basically the small version of the LA River, which is just a cesspool,” said Sam Rein, 29. “During the summer, it smells — we don’t exactly like living next to it, but it’s a neat feat of engineering, that’s for sure.” 

An aerial photo of the Bee Branch Creek in Dubuque, Iowa, in the summer of 2018. The creek is the result of a project to convert a buried storm sewer into a linear park. City Of Dubuque

It can also be dangerous, Wellenkamp said.

“As the Mississippi River rises, the River Des Peres then begins to back up into people’s basements and yards and small businesses into the city,” he said. 

Some 300 homes flooded in University City alone when the St. Louis region was hit with record-breaking rainfall in July 2022. Wellenkamp argues St. Louis should look to other cities in the Mississippi River basin who’ve learned to work with water, instead of against it.

Dubuque’s hidden creak

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dubuque, Iowa, had a major flash flooding problem. Over the course of 12 years, the city of nearly 60,000 received six presidential disaster declarations for flooding and severe storms.

Whenever heavy rains drenched the city, the water would rush down the bluff and overwhelm the stormwater infrastructure, said Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh. 

Manhole covers erupted from the water pressure, turning streets into creeks and damaging thousands of properties.

“Somewhere along the line about 100 years ago, somebody buried a natural creek and turned it into a storm sewer and it wasn’t keeping up anymore,” Cavanagh said. “Many of the residents (in these neighborhoods) are low- to moderate-income and those least able to really recover from damage like this.” 

Around 2001, the city started looking for solutions. 

Dubuque faced a decision: Expand the existing underground storm sewer or bring the Bee Branch Creek back into the daylight, expanding the floodplain and giving the water somewhere to go. The city opted for the latter option.

A child fishes in the Bee Branch Creek in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2017. The creek has become a place where people can interface and learn about watersheds. City Of Dubuque

The city established a citizen advisory committee early on in the process, which played a central role in determining the eventual design for the restored Bee Branch Creek. 

Residents wanted more than a concrete drainage ditch, Cavanagh said. They wanted trails, grasses, and greenery that wildlife and people could both enjoy — and, importantly, access to the water, he added.

The Bee Branch Creek turned into a 20-year-long project that became much more than just an engineering solution for excess rain water, Cavanagh said.

“It is one of the most beautiful parks we have in the city, a place where people go and watch the ducks and the birds,” he said.

Most importantly, it solved the city’s flash flooding issues, said Deron Muehring, Dubuque’s water and resource recovery center director, who before that role was an engineer involved with the Bee Branch restoration from start to finish. 

“2011 is the last presidential disaster declaration we had,” he said. “Now we haven’t had rains of that magnitude, but we have had significant rainstorms where we would have expected to have flooding and flood damage without these improvements.”

Learning from Dubuque

Other river cities see Dubuque’s success and want to know how they can apply it to their own flooding challenges, Cavanagh said. 

“As mayor, I’ve talked about this project more than anything else,” he said. “People want to know: ‘How did you do it? Why did you do it? What worked and what didn’t?’”

Cavanagh covered those details during a presentation on the Bee Branch to St. Louis aldermen in December, who were looking for ways to apply those lessons on the River Des Peres.

Ward 1 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer was inspired by the ideas. 

“I could wish all day long that things like this had started sooner,” Schweitzer said. “But we’re here now and we have a responsibility. The length of time something will take always feels really long, but it takes longer if we don’t start.”

Time isn’t the only constraint; money is another. The Bee Branch in Dubuque had a price tag near $250 million. The city found a mixture of state and federal grant dollars totaling $163 million related to disaster resiliency, the environment, transportation, and recreation and tourism, leaving the city covering around $87 million, Cavanagh said. 

Midwest Climate Collaborative director Heather Navarro said floodplain restoration projects like Bee Branch are worth the investment. 

A thin layer of water lines the bottom of the River Des Peres near a storm sewer outlet and pedestrian bridge on in south St. Louis in December. The river serves as a drainage channel for the city and frequently has debris and other trash in it. Eric Schmid / St. Louis Public Radio

“We have done a lot to pave over our floodplains and wetlands, but we know there’s a lot of inherent natural value in those,” she said. “Whether it is absorbing floodwaters, helping filter pollution, reducing soil erosion. When you start to add up those numbers, that really starts to change the economics. ”

She adds that when cities improve existing infrastructure like roads, bridges, and wastewater management, they should consider how to use nature-based solutions and reduce flood and other climate risks. 

“It’s not like we’re swapping out old infrastructure for new infrastructure,” Navarro said. For example, rain gardens can reduce pressure on wastewater drainage by absorbing excess water. Trees can reduce heat. “We’re really taking a whole new approach to how this infrastructure is interrelated with other systems that we’re trying to provide for our community.”

And there’s billions of dollars on the table from the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act for communities to tackle projects that build resilience. 

The path forward

As it stands, St. Louis is at the beginning of even considering what a project to bring more nature to the River Des Peres could even look like. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also exploring projects, specifically in University City, that could help store rainwater during heavy rains. 

The next major step would be a feasibility study of the entire River Des Peres watershed, which encompasses a handful of municipalities, Schweitzer said.

“There’s so many people who would need to be at the table to move something like this forward, which I don’t think is a bad thing,” she said. 

Navarro said if cities like St. Louis want to use natural infrastructure to reduce their flood risk, there’s no better time than now. 

“We know that climate change is impacting our communities,” she said. “We know that the way that we have been doing things in the past has in part contributed to where we are when it comes to the climate crisis.”

Wellenkamp agrees.

“Nature attracts business,” he said. “It stabilizes property value. It reduces crime. It creates resilience to disasters and extreme events. And it gives your place a better quality of life.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate risks increase, Mississippi River towns look to each other for solutions on Jan 6, 2024.

A sprawling analysis of ocean traffic reveals that 75 percent of industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, with the bulk of untracked fishing taking place in Southeast Asia.

Read more on E360 →

As more and more Americans embrace electric vehicles, automakers and the federal government are racing to secure the materials needed to build EV batteries, including by pouring billions of dollars into battery recycling. Today, recyclers are focused on recovering valuable metals like nickel and cobalt from spent lithium-ion batteries. But with the trade war between the U.S. and China escalating, some are now taking a closer look at another battery mineral that today’s recycling processes treat as little more than waste.

On December 1, China implemented new export controls on graphite, the carbon-based mineral that’s best known for being used in pencils but that’s also used in a more refined form in commercial EV battery anodes. The new policies, which the Chinese government announced in October shortly after the Biden administration increased restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductors to China, have alarmed U.S. lawmakers and raised concerns that battery makers outside of China will face new challenges securing the materials needed for anodes. Today, China dominates every step of the battery anode supply chain, from graphite mining and synthetic graphite production to anode manufacturing.

Along with a new federal tax credit that rewards automakers that use minerals produced in America, China’s export controls are boosting the U.S. auto industry’s interest in domestically sourced graphite. But while it could take many years to set up new graphite mines and production facilities, there is another, potentially faster option: Harvesting graphite from dead batteries. As U.S. battery recyclers build big new facilities to recover costly battery metals, some are also trying to figure out how to recycle battery-grade graphite — something that isn’t done at scale anywhere in the world today due to technical and economic barriers. These companies are being aided by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is now pouring tens of millions of dollars into graphite recycling initiatives aimed at answering basic research questions and launching demonstration plants.

If the challenges holding back commercial graphite recycling can be overcome, “the used graphite stream could be huge,” Matt Keyser, who manages the electrochemical energy storage group at the the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told Grist. In addition to boosting domestic supplies, recycling graphite would prevent critical battery resources from being wasted and could reduce the carbon emissions tied to battery production.

To understand why graphite is hard to recycle, a bit of material science is necessary. Graphite is a mineral form of carbon that has both metallic and non-metallic properties, including high electrical and thermal conductivity and chemical inertness. These qualities make it useful for a variety of energy and industrial applications, including storing energy inside lithium-ion batteries. While a lithium-ion battery is charging, lithium ions flow from the metallic cathode into the graphite anode, embedding themselves between crystalline layers of the carbon atoms. Those ions are released while the battery is in use, generating an electrical current.

Recycled graphite attached to air bubbles at a graphite recycling laboratory in Freiberg, Germany. Jens Schlueter / AFP via Getty Images

Graphite can be found in nature as crystalline flakes or masses, which are mined and then processed to produce the small, spherical particles needed for anode manufacturing. Graphite is also produced synthetically by heating byproducts of coal or petroleum production to temperatures greater than 2,500 degrees Celsius (about 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit) — an energy-intensive (and often emissions-intensive) process that triggers “graphitization” of the carbon atoms. 

Relatively cheap to mine or manufacture, graphite is lower in value than many of the metals inside battery cathodes, which can include lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. Because of this, battery recyclers traditionally haven’t taken much interest in it. Instead, with many battery recyclers hailing from the metals refining business, they’ve focused on what they already knew how to do: extracting and purifying those cathode metals, often in their elemental form. Graphite, which can comprise up to 30 percent of an EV battery by weight, is treated as a byproduct, with recyclers either burning it for energy or separating it out to be landfilled.

“Up until recently, people talking about recycling for batteries really went after those token [metal] elements because they were high value … and because that recycling process can overlap quite a bit with conventional metal processing,” Ryan Melsert, the CEO of U.S. battery materials startup American Battery Technology Company, told Grist.

For graphite recycling to be worthwhile, recyclers need to obtain a high-performance, battery-grade product. To do so, they need methods that separate the graphite from everything else, remove any contaminants like metals and glues, and restore the material’s original geometric structure, something that’s often done by applying intense heat.

Crude recycling approaches like pyrometallurgy, a traditional process in which batteries are smelted in a furnace, won’t work for graphite. “More than likely you’re going to burn off the graphite” using pyrometallurgy, Keyser said.

Today, the battery recycling industry is moving away from pyrometallurgy and embracing hydrometallurgical approaches, in which dead batteries are shredded and dissolved in chemical solutions to extract and purify various metals. Chemical extraction approaches could be adapted for graphite purification, although there are still “logistical issues,” according to Keyser. Most hydrometallurgical recycling processes use strong acids to extract cathode metals, but those acids can damage the crystalline structure of graphite. A longer or more intensive heat treatment step may be needed to restore graphite’s shape after extraction, driving up energy usage and costs.

Elements and other materials reclaimed from electric vehicle batteries, including graphite, are displayed during the London EV Show in November 2023. John Keeble / Getty Images

A third approach is direct recycling, in which battery materials are separated and repaired for reuse without any smelting or acid treatment. This gentler process aims to keep the structure of the materials intact. Direct recycling is a newer idea that’s further from commercialization than the other two methods, and there are some challenges scaling it up because it relies on separating materials very cleanly and efficiently. But recent research suggests that for cathode metals, it can have significant environmental and cost benefits. Direct recycling of graphite, Keyser said, has the potential to use “far less energy” than synthetic graphite production.

Today, companies are exploring a range of graphite recycling processes. 

American Battery Technology Company has developed an approach that starts with physically separating graphite from other battery materials like cathode metals, followed by a chemical purification step. Additional mechanical and thermal treatments are then used to restore graphite’s original structure. The company is currently recycling graphite at a “very small scale” at its laboratory facilities in Reno, Nevada, Melsert said. But in the future, it plans to scale up to recycling several tons of graphite-rich material a day with the help of a three-year, nearly $10 million Department of Energy grant funded through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

Massachusetts-based battery recycling startup Ascend Elements has also developed a chemical process for graphite purification. Dubbed “hydro-to-anode,” Ascend Elements’ process “comes from some of the work we’ve done on hydro-to-cathode,” the company’s patented hydrometallurgical process for recycling cathode materials, said Roger Lin, the vice president of global marketing and government relations at the firm. Lin said that Ascend Elements is able to take graphite that’s been contaminated during an initial shredding step back to 99.9 percent purity, exceeding EV industry requirements, while also retaining the material properties needed for high performance anodes. In October, Ascend Elements and Koura Global announced plans to build the first “advanced graphite recycling facility” in the U.S.

The Department of Energy-backed startup Princeton NuEnergy, meanwhile, is exploring direct recycling of graphite. Last year, Princeton NuEnergy opened the first pilot-scale direct recycling plant in the U.S. in McKinney, Texas. There, batteries are shredded and a series of physical separation processes are used to sort out different materials, including cathode and anode materials. Cathode materials are then placed in low-temperature reactors to strip away contaminants, followed by additional steps to reconstitute their original structure. The same general approach can be used to treat anode materials, according to founder and CEO Chao Yan. 

“From day one, we are thinking to get cathode and anode material both recycled,” Yan said. But until now, the company has focused on commercializing direct recycling for cathodes. The reason, Yan said, is simple: “No customer cared about anode materials in the past.”

That, however, is beginning to change. Yan said that over the past year — and especially in the last few months since China announced its new export controls — automakers and battery manufacturers have taken a greater interest in graphite recycling. Melsert also said that he’s starting to see “very significant interest” in recycled graphite.

A lithium-ion battery pack and wiring connections inside an electric vehicle. Getty Images

Still, customers will have to wait a little longer before they can purchase recycled graphite for their batteries. The methods for purifying and repairing graphite still need refinement to reduce the cost of recycling, according to Brian Cunningham, the batteries R&D program manager at the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. Another limiting step is what Cunningham calls the “materials qualification step.” 

“We need to get recycled graphite to a level where companies can provide material samples to battery companies to evaluate the material,” Cunningham said. The process of moving from very small-scale production to levels that allow EV makers to test a product, “could take several years to complete,” he added. “Once the recycled graphite enters the evaluation process, we should start to see an uptick in companies setting up pilot- and commercial-scale equipment.“

Supply chain concerns could accelerate graphite recycling’s journey to commercialization. Over the summer, the Department of Energy added natural graphite to its list of critical materials for energy. Graphite is also on the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of critical minerals — minerals that are necessary for advanced technologies but at risk of supply disruptions. 

This classification means that domestically sourced graphite can help EVs qualify for the “clean vehicle credit,” a tax credit that includes strict requirements around critical mineral sourcing following the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To qualify for the full credit, EV makers must obtain a large fraction of their battery minerals from the U.S. or a free-trade partner. By 2025, their vehicles may not contain any critical minerals extracted or processed by a “foreign entity of concern” — an entity connected to a shortlist of foreign countries that includes China. This requirement could “drive a premium” for domestically recycled graphite, Lin said.

Tax incentives could be key to helping recycled graphite compete with virgin graphite, according to Yuan Gu, a graphite analyst at the consulting firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Despite China’s new export controls, Gu expects graphite to remain relatively cheap in the near future due to an “oversupply” of graphite on the market right now. While Gu said that graphite recycling is “definitely on radar for Western countries” interested in securing future supplies, its viability will depend on “how costly or cheap the recycled material will be.”

If graphite recycling does catch on, industry insiders are hopeful it will be able to meet a significant fraction of the country’s future graphite needs — which are growing rapidly as the clean energy transition accelerates — while making the entire EV battery supply chain more sustainable.

“You can help regional supply chains, you can help with efficiency, with carbon footprints,” Lin said.  “I think it’s a no-brainer this will happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The next frontier in EV battery recycling: Graphite on Jan 5, 2024.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court decided not to revisit its earlier decision to strike down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban in new buildings. The ruling dealt a blow to the city of Berkeley, which requested a rehearing after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ initial decision in April, and casts uncertainty over similar policies to electrify buildings in dozens of other cities. 

In effect, the court simply chose to uphold its earlier judgment in April to invalidate Berkeley’s gas ban, legal experts told Grist. But unless the city of Berkeley chooses to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit’s judgment is now final. (The Berkeley city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment on its next steps in time for publication.) That means that for cities in the 9th Circuit region, which spans 11 western states and territories including California, Oregon, and Washington, local gas bans similar to Berkeley’s are no longer legal. 

“For cities in the 9th Circuit that have laws that are modeled closely on the Berkeley ordinance, this is a door closing,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

In 2019, Berkeley became the first city in the country to pass a ban on installing natural gas piping in new buildings, requiring all-electric appliances. Dozens of cities across the 9th Circuit region, including more than 70 in California alone, quickly followed suit, drafting new laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and indoor air pollution. 

But later that year, the California Restaurant Association initiated a lawsuit against Berkeley’s policy, arguing that natural gas stoves were essential for preparing foods like “flame-seared meats” and “charred vegetables.” In 2021, a federal district court ruled against the restaurant industry, but that decision was overturned in April 2023 by the 9th Circuit. That court held that national energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s law, which would in effect prevent the use of gas-powered appliances that meet federal standards. The city of Berkeley requested a rehearing of the case before 11 judges on the 9th Circuit — a petition that was denied in this week’s decision. 

A view of Berkeley, California, including Sather Tower and International House, with the San Francisco Bay in the background. Eric Fehrenbacher / Getty Images

Sarah Jorgensen, a lawyer for the California Restaurant Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the judges had acknowledged that “energy policy was a matter of national concern and that there should be uniform national regulation.” Sean Donahue, a lawyer for the city of Berkeley, called the order disappointing and stated that Berkeley’s ordinance “is well within its authority to protect the health and safety of its own residents,” according to the Chronicle.

Tuesday’s denial featured a detailed dissent authored by U.S. Circuit Judge Michelle Friedland and seven other judges on the 9th Circuit. “Climate change is one of the most pressing problems facing society today, and we should not stifle local government attempts at solutions based on a clear misinterpretation of an inapplicable statute,” wrote Friedland. “I hope other courts will not repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.”

Including any dissent at all is highly unusual for an action as rote as denying a petition, said Turner. “It seems like she is attempting to bolster the cases of other states and local governments that might be looking to pursue building electrification policies and providing a legal road map for why other courts should find a Berkeley-style ordinance to be lawful,” Turner noted.

In the United States, buildings account for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. For cities motivated to electrify their buildings, Tuesday’s denial of a rehearing is a “disappointing outcome,” said Jim Dennison, an attorney working on building decarbonization at the Sierra Club. Since the April ruling, several cities in California have already pulled back their own natural gas bans, including Encinitas, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo, to avoid legal risks. Eugene, Oregon, which modeled its policy on Berkeley’s, also withdrew its gas ban in June.

Yet some cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose, still have natural gas bans on the books. Tuesday’s decision could inspire those cities to take action, but ultimately, whether they decide to halt or maintain their gas bans is up to each individual government, said Turner. It could also depend on the resources they have available to take on potential legal challenges. 

A view of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in June 2017 in San Francisco, California. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“Local governments have different appetites for legal risk, and so they chose to navigate this decision and this time in different ways,” Turner said. The legal uncertainty created by the Berkeley decision especially impacts smaller communities that may not have the staff and financial resources to take on potential litigation, she said. “This uncertainty is going to cause some local governments to pull back a bit. And that’s an unfortunate reality of being a local government. They don’t always have the resources that a San Francisco or a Berkeley has to throw behind a challenge like this.”

Both Turner and Dennison emphasized that despite a setback to local gas bans, city officials still have a wide range of options available for electrifying buildings, including building codes and air pollution standards. Dennison highlights Washington state’s recently updated building codes as one legally robust way to reduce emissions from buildings. The codes, which set minimum energy efficiency standards, will require new buildings to achieve the same energy performance as buildings that use electric heat pumps beginning this year. Notably, they offer building owners flexibility in meeting the benchmarks instead of requiring them to install heat pumps or forgo natural gas.

Local governments can also consider setting emissions standards for buildings and appliances, which concern air pollution rather than energy use. That’s an approach taken by New York City, which prohibits new buildings from emitting more than a certain amount of carbon dioxide pollution. Turner notes that state utility regulators can also take steps to limit the expansion of natural gas infrastructure, which could also serve building electrification goals.

“Cities are extremely motivated to address emissions from their buildings, which are an incredibly important source of climate and health-harming pollution,” said Dennison. “And I don’t think that this court order can stand in the way of that progress.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Berkeley’s gas ban is all but dead. What does that mean for other cities? on Jan 5, 2024.

When a small Arizona community called Rio Verde Foothills lost its water supply one year ago, forcing locals to skip showers and eat off paper plates, it became a poster child for unwise desert development. The rural neighborhood of about 2,000 people north of Phoenix had relied on trucked-in water deliveries from the nearby city of Scottsdale, but the city elected to stop deliveries to conserve its own water amid a climate-fueled drought on the Colorado River.

Last month, after months of public debate over how to resolve the crisis in Rio Verde Foothills, the state government approved a deal that will restore permanent water access to the beleaguered community, albeit with much higher bills than residents are used to. But when the new legislative session begins next week, the Republican-led chamber may actually weaken the standards that govern new development, rather than tightening them, clearing the way for thousands more homes to pop up on water-insecure outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson. 

“The broader solutions are tougher, and people may not be ready to contemplate what really fixing the problem would require,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who represents part of Tucson. 

When Arizona developers build six or more homes on a tract of land, they have to demonstrate that they can supply water to those homes for at least a hundred years. This rule exists to protect home buyers from the kind of land fraud that was notorious in the state for decades, but over time some landowners have found a way around it. The developers of so-called “wildcat” subdivisions split large parcels of land into smaller chunks and sell hundreds of those chunks off one by one, skirting the requirement to ensure a long-term water supply. 

Rio Verde Foothills is one such subdivision. Many residents of the neighborhood have residential wells that pump water from underground. But because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.

As the media frenzy around Rio Verde Foothills reached a fever pitch last summer, the state legislature passed a bill that forced Scottsdale to provide water to the neighborhood through 2025. A few months later, a state regulator approved a long-term agreement between the community and a large utility called Epcor, which agreed to build a new water standpipe in the neighborhood and import a new water supply from elsewhere in Phoenix. Rio Verde Foothills residents will pay for the $12 million project through water bills that could be double or triple current rates. The deal also limits future growth in the neighborhood, allowing for just 150 additional homes to access the standpipe.

“It’s been an exhausting, exhausting fight for this community, and people are not happy with how much it costs,” said John Hornewer, a Rio Verde resident who runs the neighborhood’s largest water hauling company.

But the state legislature’s fix doesn’t address the larger problems presented by wildcat subdivisions. While Democrats and some Republicans in the legislature sought to add language that would have limited when and how developers can exploit the wildcat loophole, they couldn’t get enough support to send it to the governor’s desk. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs initially held out for a fix to the loophole — she vetoed an initial bill in May that didn’t tackle the wildcat issue — but she ultimately signed a Rio Verde-focused bill that reached her desk the following month, acknowledging that the neighborhood needed immediate help.

“The bill did not do anything to fix the underlying problem,” said Sundareshan, the state senator from Tucson. “We could find ourselves with many more communities … in the same situation.”

John Hornewer delivers water from his truck to a residential water tank in Rio Verde Foothills, Arizona. The neighborhood lost its water access last year as the Colorado River drought worsened. Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images

Hobbs has continued to push for broader reform on the wildcat issue. Last year she created a “water policy council” made up of experts and industry leaders and tasked it with alleviating the state’s water woes, including the wildcat loophole. The council released its final recommendations in December, calling on the legislature to clamp down on these subdivisions and give local governments more power to regulate them. It isn’t clear how many such subdivisions exist, but they have been popping up outside Phoenix and Tucson for at least two decades.

Democratic lawmakers will make another push once the state’s legislative session starts next week, but Hobbs’s proposed reforms still face stiff opposition. Many members of the state legislature oppose more government involvement in water regulations, and the state’s home building lobby has fought against previous efforts to clamp down on the kind of lot-splitting that enables wildcat development.

“There’s an appetite for [reform], but I think that will be lost in the shuffle,” said John Kavanagh, a Republican state senator who represents the Rio Verde Foothills area. “The home builders will be aggressively lobbying against a lot-split bill, and you’ve got some members with a more libertarian slant who believe in the right to property being almost unlimited.”

Indeed, home builders are now pushing the legislature to move in the other direction, arguing that the 100-year water supply standard is holding back the state’s economic growth. Back in June, Hobbs’s administration paused new water supply approvals in the Phoenix area, declaring that the city’s aquifers didn’t have enough water to support future development over the next century. This has left several major development projects in limbo, with builders unable to move forward on tens of thousands of homes.

Hobbs’s administration has since moved to loosen the moratorium in response to protest from the real estate industry, and regulators may soon allow builders in fast-growing suburbs like Buckeye to resume construction on stalled projects. But the state’s builders are seeking more comprehensive changes to the 100-year water supply standard: They argue that lawmakers should create an incentive for replacing water-intensive crop fields with residential neighborhoods, which require far less water than large-scale agriculture. The builders also argue that lawmakers should tweak the state’s model for calculating groundwater shortages, which they say is too pessimistic. 

“If the legislature and the governor’s office don’t agree to the necessary changes to resolve this issue this year, that would be very devastating to our housing affordability, our housing supply, and our economy,” said Spencer Kamps, the vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.

The future of the 100-year requirement is likely to take center stage this year, along with a parallel debate over how to regulate the kind of intensive groundwater pumping that has dried up wells and caused land to sink in rural areas such as Cochise County. That issue became so contentious last year that two members of Hobbs’s water policy council with ties to the agriculture industry, which is responsible for some of the most aggressive pumping, resigned before the council even finished its recommendation. 

Until the legislature reforms the wildcat subdivision statute, though, there’s nothing to stop developers from creating more vulnerable neighborhoods in the middle of the desert. Hornewer, the Rio Verde Foothills water hauler, said he’s sure his neighborhood’s crisis will play out again somewhere else.

“It’s probably already happening,” he told Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Will Arizona close a loophole that lets developers build without water? on Jan 5, 2024.

The American Ornithological Society is renaming dozens of birds and wants the public’s help.

Self-managed peasant collectives promise a more fulfilling way of organising living and work rhythms. But rural life is not without temporal constraints and compromise with others. Madeleine Sallustio, winner of the Political Ecology book prize 2023 in France, talks about the diverse experiences and struggles of these collectives, and how they can open utopian outlooks for the future.

Alain Coulombel: Your book In Search of Temporal Ecology. Experiencing Liberated Time in Neo-Peasant Collectives won the Political Ecology prize in France. How should the idea of temporal ecology be understood? 

Madeleine Sallustio: Strictly speaking, temporal ecology has nothing to do with protecting the environment. In my research, we should understand ecology in the sense of a “milieu”, a “set” of temporalities, and assume that they interact, that there’s a variety of temporalities that individuals juggle with every day. A temporality is a relationship with time, and when talking about relationships with time, we may be referring to three different dimensions. 

First of all, we might be talking about time horizons, which are the different relationships that people have with “moments in time”: the past, the present, and the future. In other words, how people think about the past, how they criticise or idealise it, how they understand the future, what their aspirations, fears, utopias, dystopias are. Second are the rhythms that govern life and work, with their cadences and repetitions, accelerations and decelerations. To study work rhythms is to consider the question of productivity, of what we’re supposed to get done in a given time. A third type of temporality is the way that work is organised, i.e. how individuals organise themselves and how they decide on their schedules (or have them imposed), how they represent time, how they collectively agree to think about time on a common basis, or don’t.  

So, the original idea for this book was to say that these different temporalities overlap, and sometimes we have to prioritise some over others, like finding someone to look after our kids when we have to work. Once we acknowledge that there are different temporalities, we can also look at which temporalities prevail over others in society. In my work, I set out to show that the temporalities associated with earning a wage in a techno-capitalist context are imposed on the lives of human beings. All of our everyday temporalities have been organised to prioritise working time to the point that we must make our other everyday temporalities slaves that we pursue around the edges, after work, at weekends, on public holidays, and again: it depends on work. 

With his concept of temporal ecology, William Grossin reminds us first that we all live in a multiplicity of temporalities. It’s something that was not necessarily obvious because, in traditional anthropology, there has been a tendency to think that each social group has its own way of thinking about time. For example, so-called “Westerners” might think that everyone shares linear time that is oriented towards the future and innovation, one that is permanently accelerating and devaluing the past. It’s not wrong, because there’s lots of work showing fairly clearly how these temporalities tend to dominate our existences, but it’s an approach that limits the representation of the diverse existences found in society. For example, I think that a French farmer, regardless of her temporal culture, has much in common with other farmers on the planet in that she has an appreciation for the temporal cyclicality in his work.  

Acknowledging multiple temporalities can lead to demands for social justice. Why not try and better organise these temporalities to achieve existential and social balance? That is what William Grossin’s concept of temporal ecology promises: the idea that, for each of us, there might be a satisfactory way of deciding how to organise temporalities. 

My hypothesis is that this is exactly what people who join self-managed neo-peasant collectives are looking for: they are after a way of organising their living and working rhythms in a manner that is democratic and satisfies their desire for individual and collective emancipation. 

In your work, you emphasise both the neo-romantic vision that sometimes defines these neo-rural communities, as well as the very strong, farming-specific temporal constraints exerted on these collectives. How do these communities collectively manage the temporal constraints associated with agriculture? 

This is why the title of my book is In Search of Temporal Ecology. These collectives are experimenting, searching, and evolving in their quest for well-being. They are people who have been on a journey before they arrive in these collectives. They have travelled extensively abroad or in France, they have sometimes been WWOOFers, might have lived in squats, or been part of one occupation movement or another. 

When they turn up at these collectives, the narrative is very much: “I’ve finally found my way, I’m going to live here and enjoy liberated work; in fact, I’m no longer even going to talk about “work”, I’m going to talk about “activity” instead, because work has a negative connotation of enslavement, of no choice, of submission to schedules that are beyond our control.” These people are young, too, mostly aged between 25 and 35. So they’re people who sometimes idealise the supposed harmony of farm work without always having had practical experience of life in the countryside. At times, some of them overestimate the environmental sustainability of living there, whereas when you’ve lived in the country for a few years, you realise that you are very dependent on the car and other things. The narrative slowly changes. 

In other words, despite their social critiques of work, the more they experiment with this way of life, the more they become aware of the pressures that stem from the temporality of agricultural work. When you decide to have goats and to make milk and cheese, it entails regularity, being active, getting rid of weeds, the brambles that keep on invading paths. You become part of a temporality linked to the seasonal cycle, of a process of perpetual renewal that can sometimes be discouraging. 

Being part of a collective informally reproduces all sorts of norms about work, and if you don’t follow them, you risk either a telling off or marginalisation within the group. 

All of this deromanticises the vision of balance, harmony, idleness, “everything grows on its own”. People who hoped to balance the temporalities of farming with, for example, the temporalities of making art, find that “temporal ecology” isn’t that easy. Being part of a collective also informally reproduces all sorts of norms about work, and if you don’t follow them, you risk either a telling off or marginalisation within the group. 

Passivity is looked upon negatively in these collectives. 

That’s right, they can’t allow people not to work. It is never formalised, there are never working hours, you never clock in and clock out. There are of course clear meeting times for collective work or similar, but people are never asked to work this many hours a week, there are no employment contracts. There are no salaries, either. Despite this vagueness, people are expected to be proactive, to not only be independent but to take the initiative too. And people’s proactiveness and receptiveness have a real impact on their legitimacy, especially when it comes to collective decision-making. They are people who join these collectives so that they no longer have to distinguish between their everyday life and their work; they no longer want to distinguish between the weekend and their work days; they want to fully identify with all aspects of life, and their work to be something that represents them. And, as a result, they end up working all the time.  

These are the conclusions people come to after a few years of collective life. They realise the extent to which all they do is work. When you walk into a room, there are always herbs drying, flowers drying, secateurs in the bathroom. You’re always in work clothes, always getting dirty. It’s hard to distinguish house clothes from casual clothes and casual clothes from work clothes. 

So, if there aren’t any rules, how do they manage the tensions that inevitably arise over how the workload is shared, for example? 

It varies a lot between collectives and depends on their maturity and the extent to which they are surrounded by other collectives who can provide them with tools and ideas, anticipate problems, etc. I’ve seen collectives that are quite different from one another. There have been collectives that were very spontaneous, that refused to organise themselves and that counted on people naturally managing themselves, only to run into fairly fraught problems. The symptom of a collective in which there’s lots of tension is a high churn rate, when the people in it keep changing.  

There are other collectives, however, that have a fairly stable population: this could be because they are very close friends, or because they bought something together. As soon as people buy collectively, things become more stable than in places that are owned by organisations or rented. If, for example, the property belongs to a long-established organisation where everyone is welcome, it will see much greater turnover than a place that people have put their own money into. 

There are no set reasons why people leave. There are some who quit collectives because it’s too much work, but there are also those who go because people don’t take it seriously enough. All things being equal, it also depends on the ambitions that people have for these collectives. Some want to be able to earn a wage from it and officially become farmers but, if the collective doesn’t allow this, they’ll go and do their experiment somewhere else. And, vice versa, some are there for the human experience, not to become farmers. 

But just because work isn’t strictly controlled, it doesn’t mean that there’s no organisation. Quite the opposite: people spend their time making collective decisions on what they want to do, how they want to do it, with whom, for whom, at what price, etc. They develop all sorts of tools to help make decision-making horizontal, to ensure that everyone works and to prevent people doing nothing. I’m thinking, for example, about household chores, which are very often put onto a chart where people have to put their name down so that everyone does their bit. But in reality, that’s rarely what happens. It remains something that’s very gendered, with women doing most of the housework, which also has consequences for their integration into collectives. 

There are people who come from squats who say, “Watch out for gender domination: it’s happening in these places. Let’s deal with it!” They will, for example, suggest single-sex working parties so that women organise themselves and teach one another how to use tools that are often exclusively used by men, like chainsaws. 

What’s the average size of these collectives? 

These collectives range from 5 to 25 people; it also depends on the number of visitors. These are places where size fluctuates a lot. There is a core, but then there are sometimes mass exoduses or mass arrivals. I know that in France there are collectives that are even bigger. I’m thinking of those collectives founded in the 1960s, which can be pretty large. 

Have you been able to compare the communities of the 1960s with the neo-peasant communities that you’ve observed in the field today? Did they face the same challenges? 

I came across a diary published by a collective that I knew, written by the founders in the 1960s. In this diary, you can see that the issues they faced at the time are akin to those that I observed in contemporary collectives. Questions regarding relationships of domination, gender, work, productivity, choices about what to buy and eat… Romantic relationships too. In fact, these things are fairly similar to what might happen today. 

There are differences, of course, such as the financial fragility of past collectives, which is not the same at all. Today, the people that I’ve met have an RSA [revenu de solidarité active – a social welfare benefit], at the very least. They also benefit from the opening up of the countryside, which wasn’t the case before. They aren’t pioneers: they’re in an environment where there are already potentially “allied” networks, where organic farming isn’t something eccentric. For the people moving into neo-peasant collectives today, the impact is less costly from a social point of view and in terms of the financial tools and resources that they can draw on. That said, these settlements are taking place in a context where land prices have dramatically increased, property and agricultural markets are saturated, and there is high tourist pressure. This changes things for initiatives aiming to do away with private property: they become tricky to set up. 

You mentioned how these communities are networked. How does this come about? 

They share their experiences – and more. There’s a sort of activism tourism, which means activists move between causes a lot, they keep up to date with what’s happening in the ZADs in Bure, in the Pyrenees, in the Alps. Individuals carry this news themselves: sometimes they go and take part in big events or protests to provide support, to learn, to meet people. They might provide sustenance by, for example, taking unsold produce from the market to a squat that’s part of the movement. They may also supply equipment or labour to other neo-peasants. For example, they might say: “We’ve got a processing facility that meets regulations. Why don’t you come and make your chestnut cream here? It would allow you to lower your production costs.” They run lots of collective projects too. Neo-peasant collectives are also places where, because they have space, there are often big parties, concerts, conférences gesticulées [informal talks that are a cross between lectures and one-person plays]. Political meetings might also be held there, be they for national or international movements. When the Zapatistas came to Europe, for example, some of these places hosted them. 

Focusing on the present opens up utopian outlooks for the future.

This idea of a network is incredibly important because I think it’s part of the political utopia that many believe in: the idea that by networking, developing solidarity practices, by staying informed, you can weave a fabric of resistance, or even revolution, although people will never admit as much. There is constant swinging between utopia and the dystopia of a future world that does not augur well economically, socially, or democratically, with the rise of the far right across the globe. The people I’ve met are quite pessimistic about their chances, their levers for change. What we have are political contradictions, but they make things happen: the utopian and dystopian temporalities interact and, in so doing, make these practices exist in the present. If they were that defeatist, they wouldn’t put so much energy into these initiatives. Why wear yourself out improving self-management if we’re all going to be dead in 50 years’ time anyway? Focusing on the present opens up utopian outlooks for the future. 

Do they regard their community experiment as an act of resistance against the prevailing model today? 

Yes, absolutely. It wouldn’t necessarily be expressed by everyone in the same way and one of the things that I’ve had to reckon with is that I came projecting my own expectations. I was confronted with the distinctiveness of these collectives who want to escape political labels or a political programme with a universal vision of the stages that a society must go through to become fair and egalitarian. They have freed themselves from this; they avoid asking themselves these sorts of questions. It can be very irritating for a Marxist like me who tries to think on a more global level, who dreams of a cohesive model of society in which the working classes could unite.  

But these initiatives exist and, as one of the people I spoke to for my book said, “at least it exists, and it’s a quest, it’s a search; there are spaces where people can ask themselves questions and experiment.” I think that in the contemporary political landscape it’s significant that there are people able to organise, to create an alternative temporal universe amid these dark, foreboding clouds, to have someone who says, “right, we’re going to take the helm and try to go this way.” These micro-experiments exist. They make the present very thick and rich, one that is shaping a whole generation of people. Perhaps these initiatives must be unstable, perhaps they are destined to be fleeting, but once people experience them, they become part of the reality. 

This is a translated and edited version of an interview published in French by the Fondation de l’écologie politique.

The government of Azerbaijan has appointed its environment minister Mukhtar Babayev to be the president of the Cop29 climate talks in Baku in November.

While Babayev will chair the talks, Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister Yalchin Rafiyev will be his lead negotiator, according to the Cop28 presidency.

Babayev spent 26 years at Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas company Socar, where he tried to limit the company’s environmental damage, before becoming environment minister in 2018.

One negotiator who met Babayev recently described him as “nice” and “soft” but added “you don’t feel the authority and status like from [Cop28 president] Sultan [Al-Jaber], I don’t feel he is an independent person able to push for phasing out fossil fuels globally”.

Rafiyev is a newcomer to climate diplomacy. He did not attend the Cop26 or Cop27 climate talks and his active X (formerly known as Twitter) account has only mentioned climate change once in over six years.

Babayev will be the 24th man – and the fourth man in a row – to chair the Cop climate talks compared to only five women.

A Socar veteran

With Azerbaijan’s media severely restricted, there is not much information publicly available about Babayev other than his official ministry biography and leaked US diplomatic cables.

What is known is that he grew up in Baku, went to university in Moscow and served in the Soviet military in the late 1980s.

After Azerbaijan gained independence from the Soviet Union, he joined the newly-named State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar) in 1992, where he stayed for 26 years.

After a stint in marketing, he was appointed the company’s vice-president of ecological affairs, which involved trying to reverse the environmental damage caused by the company. 

In this position, he hosted an international conference on rehabilitating contaminated soils in 2008, where he warned that a drop in the oil price could have a negative impact on the company’s efforts to clean Azerbaijan’s soil.

China announces plans to manage electric vehicles power demand

Around this time, the US ambassador in Baku Anne Derse said he told her that he wanted to change the company’s attitude towards the environment while still developing the country’s oil and gas production.

Derse says Babayev joked to the company’s then vice-president for field development that they were now enemies as he wanted to change the way Socar develops its resources and his colleague wanted to continue business as usual.

“On a broader scale,” Derse said, “Babayev said his mission was to “change the mentality” of Azerbaijanis about their responsibilities to preserve the environment”.

She concluded concluded that he “seems enthusiastic and in possession of a clear vision of what he hopes to accomplish”.

While in this position, Babayev became a member of parliament for the ruling party. In 2018, Azerbaijan’s authoritarian ruler Ilham Aliyev appointed him environment minister.

A new beat

While Cop presidents front the talks, they delegate much of the behind the scenes work to their lead negotiator.

Previous lead negotiators like Archie Young, Mohammed Nasr and Hana Alhashimi have been experienced climate diplomats.

Cop29’s lead negotiator will be 36-year old Yalchin Rafiyev. The United Nations participant logs suggest his first climate meeting was the annual talks in Bonn in June 2023 followed by Cop28 in November.

Joanna Depledge researches climate talks at Cambridge University. She told Climate home that “Rafiyev seems to be a rather unknown quantity”.

She said this will make it harder for him to establish his leadership, good working relationships and trust – particularly as he’s been appointed later than usual, with just 11 months to go.

“But”, she added, “there is still time for the Azerbaijani presidency team to hit the ground running and to plough political energy and resources into the process.”

Brazil cracks down on illegal gold miners

After an international relations degree from Baku State University, Rafiyev studied at the Nato defence college in Rome and the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Austria.

He joined Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry in 2007 and spent several years in their Austrian embassy before representing the country with the United Nations and other international organisations in Geneva, Switzerland.

Depledge said that “Rafiyev’s extensive experience in the Azerbaijani diplomatic service, including a stint working on UN affairs in Geneva, will serve him well. But he has a lot of catching up to do”.

In 2018, he joined the ministry’s international security department where he stayed until Aliyev appointed him deputy foreign minister in September 2023.

In 2020, Azerbaijan launched a victorious six-week war with Armenia which has led to continuing tensions between the two. Much of his X feed criticises alleged genocide by Armenia.

Ten climate questions for 2024

When Azerbaijan was chosen as the host of Cop29, he posted: “Finally it is official! After World Urban Forum, Azerbaijan was granted the right to host the biggest United Nations event (COP29) in Baku.”

The Eastern European group of nations chose Azerbaijan as Cop29 host at Cop28, after Russia vetoed any European Union member state hosting the talks.

An unexpected choice

E3G negotiations analyst Tom Evans described it as an “unusual and unexpected” choice because Azerbaijan “doesn’t have a long track record of diplomacy at the [UN climate arm]”.

Azerbaijan gets two-thirds of its revenue from oil and gas, one of the highest percentages in the world and more than the Cop28 host – the United Arab Emirates.

The country has been ruled for 20 years by Ilham Aliyev, who took over as president from his father. According to Human Rights Watch, the government had at least 30 political dissidents in its prisons in 2022.

The campaign group said that restrictive laws continued to impede nongovernmental organizations from operating independently and that there are restrictions on media and systemic torture of prisoners.

The post Azerbaijan appoint state oil company veteran as Cop29 president appeared first on Climate Home News.

China’s state planner has issued new rules on strengthening the integration of new energy vehicles with the electric grid, as the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles (EVs) aims to manage its power demand amid a transition to renewable energy.

The notice, published on Thursday by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, calls for the creation of initial technical standards governing new energy vehicle integration into the grid by 2025.

New energy vehicles will become an important part of the country’s energy storage system by 2030, it said.

As electricity demand surges due to the increasing popularity of new EVs, solutions are being sought by governments and other stakeholders to prevent power networks from being overwhelmed, as millions of people plug in their vehicles for charging at the same time.

Ten climate questions for 2024

Charging during off-peak hours as well as ‘vehicle-to-grid’ charging – where millions of EV owners could sell their EV batteries’ juice back to grid operators during peak hours – have been seen as potential solutions.

Last year, Brattle Group analyst Ryan Hledik told Climate Home that charging during off-peak hours should make EV use cheaper and therefore more widespread. But he warned that vehicle to grid technology and its business case are still in their infancy.

China is seeking to use these strategies to manage peak power demand through the integration of electric vehicles into the power system, according to the NDRC.

By 2025, NDRC said it would set up over 50 pilot programs in regions where conditions for vehicle-grid integration are relatively mature, including in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing, Sichuan and Chongqing.

China plans to build over 300 coal-fired power plants. But its government says it does not intend to run all of them at full capacity – instead running them only when needed to top up renewable electricity. So flattening demand peaks will reduce emissions.

Sudan’s Cop28 delegates “really hurt” by silence on their civil war

The transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is likely to make the supply of electricity more difficult to control. Power plants can ramp electricity production up and down in a way that solar panels and wind turbines can’t.

So across the world, governments are looking to similar policies to manage the demand for electricity so that it fits more closely with the supply of electricity – known as demand management.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, for example, electricity costs different amounts at different times of the day. This encourages people to use electricity at night when its cheaper.

Similarly in South Africa, the grid operator Eskom incentivises its biggest industrial customers to shift their use of electricity to when its most abundant.

In the US state of Vermont, a utility called Green Mountain Power is deploying Tesla Powerwall batteries to people’s homes.

Most of the year when there’s no shortage of power, residents use this as a backup generator but when there is a shortage the utility uses the electricity for the grid.

The post China announces plans to manage electric vehicles power demand appeared first on Climate Home News.

Hundreds of scientists journey to Antarctica each year to work in the continent’s 77 research stations, used by some 30 countries. Many are there to study how the unique ecology and endemic wildlife in this faraway land is changing with human pressures like climate change.

These scientists, along with the 50,000 tourists and dozens of fishing boats in the offshore waters, pose a threat themselves: accidentally providing passage to nonnative species. Antarctica and its waters have remained relatively isolated, thanks to its distance from other places, frigid temperatures and ocean currents.

But in recent decades an increase in human traffic and pressures from climate change are opening the door for invasive species — those nonnatives that can rapidly spread, outcompeting native plants and animals, or become unchecked predators.

So far 11 nonnative invertebrates, including mites and an earthworm, have established themselves on the warmer parts of the continent.

In the water it’s a slightly different story.

A 2019 study in Global Change Biology reported five nonnative species in the coastal waters, including a Chilean mussel and a crab. But so far none of these visitors has established populations. And scientists are urging vigilance to keep it that way.

“For now, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean remain the least invaded marine regions on the planet and represent humanity’s last chance to demonstrate that we can manage and mitigate the risks of invasive species at a continental scale,” Arlie McCarthy, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the study, wrote in an op-ed for The Conversation. “If we do not, climate change will open the door to the world and our neglect will transform the iconic ecosystems we love.”

Staving Off Invaders

Natural forces are Antarctica’s best protection. The ocean current that churns off its shores, known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, pushes floating species away from the continent. That defense is buoyed by cold water that makes survival extremely difficult for nonnative species, who aren’t especially adapted to the environment.

Sea ice creates another barrier to movement, with less than one-seventh of the coastline ice-free in summer and none of it ice-free in winter.

“Individuals that manage to cross the Polar Front are confronted with ice in all its forms, freezing temperatures, physical disturbance from icebergs, and strong seasonal variation in light availability and water chemistry,” researchers explained in the Global Change Biology study. “These extreme conditions often sit at or are beyond the physiological limits of potentially invading marine species.”

This natural shield, however, is being weakened by climate-change-warmed waters.

“Changes in physical factors (decreasing ice cover, increasing water temperature) will, if unchecked, in time create an environment more hospitable to nonnative species and less hospitable to native species, reducing the resistance of Antarctic ecosystems (Antarctic biodiversity) to establishment of nonnative marine species,” wrote the researchers.

Most marine species are likely to arrive on the hulls of ships, known as biofouling, although researchers note that microplastics could be a future concern.

Ships arrive from ports all over the world — some even making the journey from Arctic to Antarctic, which could carry some cold-loving organisms with them. While tourist ships usually only dock at each port for a few hours, research and resupply vessels can linger for weeks, providing ample time for stowaways.

Visitors in Antarctica. Photo: Ian Duffy, CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED

More than 180 ships were involved in more than 500 voyages active in the area between 2017 and 2018 — a big jump from the 30 vessels and 75-100 voyages in 1960. Fishing boats and those carrying researchers or their supplies create other opportunities.

Although it’s difficult with ocean currents, new species could arrive in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica by rafting on aggregates of algae. Millions of these so-called kelp rafts are afloat in the Southern Ocean.

“We found nonnative kelps, with a wide range of ‘hitchhiking’ passenger organisms, on an Antarctic beach inside the flooded caldera of an active volcanic island,” wrote researchers in a 2020 study in Scientific Reports. “This is the first evidence of nonnative species reaching the Antarctic continent alive on kelp rafts.”

Of the four “passenger” species found alive on the nonnative kelp, the most concerning, they said, is Membranipora membranacea, a kind of bryozoan invertebrate that can form across seaweed, limiting its ability to reproduce and grow.

The warmer waters inside the caldera may have proved a tolerable temperature, while much of the surrounding coastal waters are too cold — at least for now.

Growing Risks

If nonnative marine species do begin to establish themselves in the Southern Ocean, their impact can ripple across the food web, a forthcoming study concluded.

“We found that these invasive species can actually cause really catastrophic declines in native species abundances,” says lead author Oakes Holland, a postdoctoral research fellow with Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future, an initiative of the Australian Research Council. “Things like mytilid bivalves can reproduce quickly and just smother all the hard surfaces on the bottom of the ocean, which will push other species out.”

Northern Pacific seastars (Asterias amurensis), known to be voracious predators, are another concern. So too are crabs, a “niche of predator that has been absent from the region for millions of years,” she says.

Asterias amurensis. Photo by Dean Franklin, CC BY 2.0 DEED

While Holland’s work has identified species to be wary of, she cautions that what we don’t know is even more problematic. The icy waters of the Southern Ocean are difficult to study. “At the moment, it’s just such an enormous area and it’s so hard to even know where to start looking,” she says.

There’s not much known yet about what organisms are being carted along on ship hulls either. Current research on nonnative marine species comes from studying just seven ships, including a confiscated illegal fishing vessel.

“We’re very much in the infancy stage of understanding where the biggest risks are going to come from, specifically on ships, and then how best to manage them in a way that’s not going to be economically limiting,” she says.

Visiting scientists could be part of the problem — and solution.

When underwater drones and submersibles are deployed for research, the collected data could be mined using machine learning to search for nonnative species, she says. Researchers have also recommended using environmental DNA, the genetic material shed by organisms into the air or water, that can help detect a species’ presence in the environment even when it hasn’t been seen.

And although the coastal waters of the continent are vast, efforts to ramp up biosecurity should focus on the most highly visited locations that are likely to be “invasion hotspots” — like the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands, say researchers.

The threat of invasive species is only one of the mounting pressures facing Antarctic wildlife, including warming waters, melting sea ice, ocean acidification and pollution. But broad conservation actions, like increasing marine protected areas, could help on all fronts.

“I think when people are thinking of Antarctica, they’re not necessarily thinking of ugly little worms on the seafloor,” says Holland. “They’re thinking of penguins and seals and whales. So if we get marine protected areas for emperor penguins, for example, then everything that lives underneath that is going to benefit.”

Previously in The Revelator:

Action for Antarctica: Saving the World’s Last Great Wilderness

The post Antarctica’s Looming Threat appeared first on The Revelator.

UK consumption causing massive deforestation Channel News brendan 4th January 2024 Teaser Media

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with El País. A Spanish-language version can be read here. Reporting was supported by the Joan Konner Program in the Journalism of Ideas.

On the morning of June 12, 2022, Ángela Astudillo, then a law student in her mid-20s, grabbed her water bottle and hopped into her red Nissan Juke. The co-founder of Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, a textile recycling advocacy nonprofit, and the daughter of tree farmers, Astudillo lives in a gated apartment complex in Alto Hospicio, a dusty city at the edge of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, with her husband, daughter, bunny, and three aquatic turtles. 

Exiting the compound, Astudillo pinched the wheel, pulled over next to a car on the side of the road, and greeted Bárbara Pino, a fashion professor, and three of her students, who were waiting inside. 

They headed toward a mountain of sand known as El Paso de la Mula. Less than a mile from her home, squinting into the distance, Astudillo saw a thread of smoke rising from its direction. With her in the lead, the two vehicles caravanned toward the dune, the site of the second-largest clothes pile in the world. 

As they got closer to El Paso de La Mula, the thin trail of smoke had expanded into a huge black cloud. Astudillo stopped the car and texted the academics behind her. 

It looks like it’s on fire. Hopefully, it’s not there. :( :( :(

She then dialed them directly and asked, “Do you still want to go?”

A Chilean flag stands in a traffic cone among burned piles of clothing in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

Pino, director of Santiago’s Fashion System Observatory at Universidad Diego Portales, had planned this trip for months. Astudillo had volunteered to be their guide. The mound of discarded fabric in the middle of the Atacama weighed an estimated 11,000 to 59,000 tons, equivalent to one or two times the Brooklyn Bridge. 

By the time the team reached the gates of El Paso de la Mula, more than half of the clothes pile was on fire. Smoke obscured everything, hanging like an opaque black curtain. Municipal authorities turned the group away, forbidding them to stay on the premises. But Astudillo knew the landscape, so she directed the team to the dune’s far side, where access was still unimpeded. 

There, the students surveyed the inferno. It was “like a war,” Pino said. She felt waves of heat. Black smoke unspooled from the burning clothes. The air was dense and hard to breathe. Smoke coated the back of their throats and clogged their nostrils with the acrid smell of melting plastic. They covered their faces, trying not to breathe it in. Then the group heard a series of loud pops as mini explosions burst from within the vast expanse of burning garments. 

Ángela Astudilo holds a piece of discarded clothing from the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

Despite the danger, Pino and her students rummaged, pulling out specimens to examine from among unburned portions of the pile. On prior visits to the clothes dump, Astudillo had uncovered clothing produced by the world’s most well-known brands: Nautica, Adidas, Wrangler, Old Navy, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Forever 21, Zara, Banana Republic. Store tags still dangled from many of her findings. The clothes had come to the Atacama from Europe, the United States, Korea, and Japan. Now, as Astudillo began taking pictures and uploading them to Instagram, Pino wandered the mound, horrified and fascinated by the grotesque volume and variety of apparel: ski jackets, ball gowns, bathing suits. She plucked out a rhinestone-encrusted platform stiletto in perfect condition. She crouched to search for its match, but the wind was getting stronger. If it shifted, the team realized, they’d be trapped in the spreading fire. 

For 14 years, no rain has fallen in Alto Hospicio or the surrounding Atacama Desert region. Those dry conditions, coupled with the nonbiodegradable, predominantly synthetic, petroleum-derived fibers that modern clothes are made with, meant that the pile never shrank. Instead, for more than two decades, it grew — metastasized — with every discarded, imported item that was added.

In 2021, six months prior to the fire, a photographer from Agence France Presse, Martín Bernetti, captured a bird’s-eye image of this sprawling mound of apparel, essentially an oil slick, strewn across the edge of the Atacama desert. 

The aerial image was picked up by news outlets across the globe, from the front page of the New York Post to the BBC, and continues to circulate today. But the mountain of clothes depicted by that 2021 drone photo is utterly gone. As Astudillo, Pino, and the three students witnessed, and unwittingly tasted: The blaze tore through the pile, throwing black plumes of toxic ash into the air.

An aerial view of used clothes discarded in the Atacama Desert, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile, on September 26, 2021. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images

The town of Alto Hospicio sits on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean, a bedroom community for the seaside vacation city of Iquique below. Imagine if Atlantic City in New Jersey were simultaneously hemmed in and backed by a high Nevada plateau, and if the two locales were connected by a two-lane switchback highway. 

Each day in Iquique’s port, giant cranes pluck containers full of discarded clothing from the decks of ships and deposit them onto flatbed trucks. No one really knows exactly how much clothing passes through the port every year; estimates range from 60,000 to 44 million tons. Next, they head to the nearby Free Trade Zone, known locally as “Zofri,” where trailers back into the warehouses of 52 used-clothes importers and forklift operators transfer sealed bales of clothing, or fardos, inside. 

Chile is the biggest importer of secondhand clothing in South America, and between 2020 and 2021 it was the fastest-growing importer of used clothing in the world. The port of Iquique is an established tax-free zone, incentivizing this booming industry of castaway textiles.

A vendor in Iquique sells secondhand shoes. Muriel Alarcón

From Zofri, bales of clothing are sold, uninspected, to merchants betting that at least some of the items inside are sales-worthy. “When you buy, you are buying with your eyes closed,” one former merchant said. Sometimes 80 percent of the garments in a bale are usable. Sometimes the opposite is true. Because bales are so cheap, however, most merchants need only sell 40 percent to turn a profit. 

According to the global environmental advocacy group Ekō (formerly known as SumofUS), an estimated 85 percent of the used clothing imported into Iquique remains unsold. Chilean federal law states it’s illegal to dispose of textiles. 

Considered Iquique’s backyard, Alto Hospicio is one of the poorest cities in Chile, widely known as a place to abandon pets and dump trash. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the small desert town is where more than a dozen teenage girls mysteriously vanished, until their apprehended killer led authorities to bodies buried in desert graves. 

Manuela Medina, left, and her family pose for a photo near their clothing pile in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

In 2001, Manuela Medina*, a former gardener, saw an opportunity in Iquique’s growing textile abundance. Relocating to Alto Hospicio, she established an unauthorized compound on government lands at the base of El Paso de la Mula, the huge sand dune at the far side of an unregulated shantytown. Every few days, she hired a fletero — a driver with a jalopy — to travel the switchback roads, out of the brown dunes of Alto Hospicio, to arrive in the colorful oceanside city of Iquique, which sits a thousand miles north of the country’s capital, Santiago.

Near the dock where cranes unload massive container ships, inside Iquique’s free trade zone, Medina ventured into the contiguous warehouses, asking secondhand clothing importers, “Do you have any garbage?” 

Back at her compound, Medina unloaded her wares in piles on the ground where she had the luxury of storing them indefinitely — the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, meaning items don’t undergo normal degradation from elements like rain. Here, Medina sold her piles to merchants and others for $10 each. 

As more and more bales of ropa americana, or secondhand clothes, arrived in Iquique, the clothes flooded importers’ warehouses and overflowed vendors’ stalls in open air markets, including La Quebradilla — one of the largest open air markets in South America, located just a few miles from Medina’s unauthorized compound. 

Fernando Alarcón

Soon, importers and secondhand merchants began to deliver surplus used clothes directly to Medina. Fed by daily truck deliveries, and then by multiple daily tractor trailer load deliveries, Medina’s pile grew.

By 2020, Medina’s gargantuan desert dump had become an open secret in Chile, stretching across dozens of acres. Others followed her model, creating mini-dumps across the desert and along roadsides, but Medina’s pile remained the largest. 

On March 29, 2022, Paulin Silva, an environmental lawyer, stood before the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta, a regional tribunal in northern Chile that specializes in resolving environmental issues within its jurisdiction. She was presenting a lawsuit, brought on behalf of herself as a resident of Iquique, against the municipality and the federal Chilean government for their inaction over the sprawling, unregulated clothes dumps. For her submission of evidence, she asked the tribunal to join her in touring the mound of clothing.

Paulin Silva poses for a photo in an office. She has pushed the government to take action on the illegal clothing dumps near Iquique, Chile. Fernando Alarcón

For weeks, her informal team of supporters (a geographer, her sister, and her brother-in-law) had been documenting the problem, joking among themselves, “In which dump are we going to party tonight?”

Since obtaining her law degree, Silva has prosecuted a handful of environmental cases, but this one was personal, and she felt empowered to tackle it: “I have the education; I am a lawyer; I can do something,” she said. She’d grown up in northern Chile, a pencil thin country bordered by the Pacific Ocean. Her father is from Alto Hospicio and her mother is from Iquique. At 35, she’s several years older than Astudillo, the co-founder of the nonprofit Dress Desert, whom Silva asked to be a witness for the case. When Silva was a child, she observed people dumping clothes everywhere — the streets, yards, and city squares. Because this was the only place she knew for so much of her life, she thought, “It’s normal for people to live with … garbage accumulated around them.” 

This local “clothes-blindness” was documented by Astudillo’s colleague, Bastián Barria, an engineering student and her co-founder of Dress Desert. In November 2020, he and others conducted a survey to ascertain local attitudes regarding the clothing waste. Of the almost 400 people in Alto Hospicio he surveyed, representing less than 1 percent of the town’s population, more than half did not think there was any issue.

When Silva was 18, she moved a thousand miles south, to Valparaiso in central Chile, to study law and that was where she remained until the pandemic, when she returned home. That’s when she realized the dump situation had worsened. Exponentially. 

Shoes pile up in an illegal clothing dump in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

During the decades between Silva’s girlhood and today, clothing production worldwide doubled, while utilization — the number of times an item of clothing is worn before it is thrown away — declined by 36 percent. Countries like Chile, Haiti, and Uganda became depositories for fast fashion discards. In 2021 alone, Chile imported more than 700,000 tons of new and used clothing — the weight equivalent of 70 Eiffel Towers.

“Even if we stopped clothing production throughout the world tonight,” said Francisca Gajardo, an Iquique-born fashion designer, “we still have more garments than we need or that the Earth can safely hold. It won’t go away nicely, and we’re not stopping today.” 

Nine days after the giant fires, around 4 p.m., Silva was having a light meal, the Chilean equivalent of afternoon tea known as once (pronounced “on-say”), with her family in northern Chile. A few days prior, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta had informed her it was ready to view her case evidence by touring the clothes pile in person. Silva took out her phone to share the good news on Instagram with Desierto Vestido, but before she could, she saw the images of the burning clothes Desierto Vestido had just uploaded and shared. 

Silva sprang from her chair to process what was happening to the evidence in her case just a few miles away. She suspected why the court had been willing to view the landfill: “Because obviously the matter was burned,” she told Grist.

While no official cause of the fires has ever been reported, local residents claim it began late on Saturday night or in the early hours of Sunday. Days later, toxic air still clung to the area. Astudillo, who visited the site regularly, described the pile as “volcanic” — with clothes smoldering under the sand, venting smoke full of textile chemicals from synthetic materials. She warned, “You can’t be outside for long.” 

In the days following the fire, on June 22, instead of leading the tour of the prosecutorial evidence, Silva filed a statement to the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta: “With sadness and shame I inform you that 11,000 tons of clothes in the textile dump were burned.” 

Graffiti in one of the most dangerous shantytowns in Chile, near Manuela Medina’s home. The word “votar” is likely supposed to be “botar,” which in Spanish means “throw.” But in its current form, it reads, “Do not vote trash. It will be reported.” Fernando Alarcón

Although Paulin provided the court with Dress Desert’s smartphone video recordings of the clothes in flames, the defense argued that the Instagram account where they’d posted the videos could not be verified and confirmed. Lacking a certifiable timestamp, the films were inadmissible.

One year later, in August 2023, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta called a trial hearing so that all parties involved in the case — the Consejo de Defensa del Estado, the body that judicially represents the state in Chile, the municipality of Alto Hospicio, and Silva — could present evidence.

During the hearing, the Mayor at Alto Hospicio, Patricio Ferreira, said that one of his priorities is to “transform this problem into an opportunity to generate employment.” He alluded to discussions he had with European businessmen to explore initiatives related to recycling.

Silva got people to testify in her favor, activists and academics who have given statements to different media outlets about the environmental problem generated by the textile landfill in the Chilean desert. But on the day of the hearing, none of them arrived.

“At the end of the day, in practice, I am alone in this action,” she said.

Chile’s government recently voted to adopt recycling measures that make certain producers accountable for their waste. Known as the extended producer responsibility law, or REP using its Spanish acronym, the legislation passed in 2016 and took effect in January 2023. Currently, Chilean companies that make tires and packaging (such as bags, plastics, paper or cardboard, cans and glass) must comply. 

Eventually, according to the Ministry of the Environment, Chile intends to incorporate clothing and textiles as a priority product into the REP law.

However, in the case of clothes, many describe the REP as a “paper solution” that lacks tangible enforcement, said Pino, from the Universidad Diego Portales.

In parallel, the Ministry of the Environment is developing a circular economy strategy for textile waste. Unlike the REP, the agency crafts public policy for the public and private sectors to prevent overproduction. 

The ministry has been holding workshops and conversations to collect input from stakeholders, including academics, business executives, retailers and nonprofit leaders. It is also tabulating the results of a preliminary survey on consumer clothes-buying habits. The details of this circular economy strategy is expected to be published in March this year.

At the minister’s invitation, Pino has shared her fashion expertise — both in the markets and in the desert — with the group. “These two things are wonderful initiatives,” she said about both efforts, but she lamented that they fail to address the issue of used clothes. 

Bárbara Pino, director of the Fashion System Observatory, stands on the campus of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. Fernando Alarcón

A decade ago, when the REP was first being discussed, Denisse Morán, president of the Tarapacá Recyclers and the head of ServiREC, a recycling cooperative that operates within Iquique’s free trade zone, sought out her local representative to request that the law apply to both clothing producers and clothing importers. 

“Oh, because you are from Iquique?” she recalled him asking her. 

“Not only because I am from Iquique,” she replied, “but because we all wear clothes.”

For years, many residents in Alto Hospicio saw the piles of textiles as more of an opportunity than an eyesore or environmental threat, something that supported the local economy. 

When Jazmín Yañez arrived in town from southern Chile in 2018 almost penniless and on the brink of homelessness, for example, someone gave her a few cast-off garments and household garbage — from towels, kitchen implements to furniture — to sell. Ever since, Yañez, now 28, has waged a zealous campaign to salvage, fix, and reutilize all “waste” materials. She operates an informal store from the kitchen of her house called Stop Recicla: “Your trash is my treasure,” where she sells, exchanges, and gifts items such as rugs, used clothing, school supplies, costumes, and electronics to impoverished mothers, like she once was.

Jazmín Yañez poses next to a pile of secondhand clothing that she will sell in her home-based store, Stop Recicla. Fernando Alarcón

It’s this trash/treasure duality that kept Astudillo and other locals from viewing the region’s booming used clothing trade as a problem. But six months before the fires, in January 2022, Nathalia Tavolieri, a Brazilian journalist, invited Astudillo to El Paso de La Mula, where she encountered Manuela Medina’s mountain for the first time. 

Astudillo had seen numerous clothing dumps strewn and mounded throughout the desert, but nothing as big as this immense tangle of blouses and pants. “It was terrible,” she said, weeping as she recalled her first visit. “Maybe if I had been older, maybe I could have done more things [to stop this from happening].”

The experience galvanized her. She had already co-founded her nonprofit Dress Desert, or Desierto Vestido, two years before, to raise awareness and creatively respond to the country’s burgeoning waste clothing issue. As part of the project’s efforts, she and 20 other members host workshops and conversations. They upcycle castaway materials into new garments and craft household items. Seeing the vastness of Medina’s clothing pile, Astudillo stepped up her resolve, because “many people don’t see — or don’t want to see.”

“It was very, very hard,” she said, “to know that we live in a place that is so polluted and damaged by everyone’s waste.” Several months later, Astudillo brought Gajardo, the clothes designer and a fellow Iquiquean, to the dump, and gained an ally in her efforts. Despite growing up and shopping at the region’s numerous outdoor secondhand clothes markets, Gajardo was appalled by the scope of the waste. She developed rashes from rummaging among the fabrics. 

A garment emerges in stages from the desert sand in the Atacama Desert. Fernando Alarcón

“The fact that we have a desert, the fact that there’s a place to receive this, doesn’t mean that the place has to become the dump of the world,” she said. Since then, Gajardo’s conviction to never design clothes from virgin materials has deepened. Additionally, through her brand You Are the New Generation, she offers workshops in reusing garments, and visited Kansas City, Missouri, last year through the U.S. State Department’s Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative to teach people to make new clothes by harvesting old ones.

Other entrepreneurs have attempted to turn the clothes problem into revenue, but have faced a series of setbacks. 

Franklin Zepeda is a celebrated Chilean entrepreneur who toured Europe’s textile recycling plants before returning to the region in 2013 to establish Ecofibre, now known as Procitex. (Its name is an acronym meaning Proceso Circular en Textil in Spanish).

With seed funding from CORFO, the Chilean economic development agency, and later from private capital, Zepeda was able to route textiles imported into Iquique to his plant, where they were disassembled, shredded, doused with flame retardant, and transformed into insulation panels. Zepeda got praise for this work in several major international news outlets, but he shuttered his plant in Alto Hospicio in 2021 because of unfavorable economics, including the taxes on shipping the insulation panels to other regions of the country.

Dario Blanco, manager of the ZOFRI User Association AG (AUZ), a trade association that brings together businessmen from the Iquique free zone, believes that the solution to the region’s problem of discarded clothing is out there — it will just take the right company and policies. And there are plenty of entrepreneurs, fashion designers, and environmentalists working on the issue of textile waste, both in Chile and internationally.

Men work at a factory that recycles used textiles discarded in the Atacama Desert for wooden isolation panels for the walls of social housing, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile in 2021. Martin Bernetti / AFP via Getty Images

As Bloomberg reported in May, New York, California, Sweden, and the Netherlands are developing legislation similar to Chile’s extended producer responsibility law that went into effect this year, mandating that the fashion industry fund recycling programs via tariffs calibrated to the quantity of garments produced.

In order to help New York City uphold its existing law limiting or forbidding textiles in the waste stream, FabScrap, a nonprofit founded in 2016 by a former New York Department of Sanitation worker, receives 7,000 pounds of pre-consumer textile waste each week. Sorted by volunteers, the nonsynthetic scrap items are sent to a New Jersey facility that shreds the material, producing “shoddy,” a stuffing used to fill punching bags, sofas, and soft toys.

A Czech company called RETEX has been attempting to bring its fabric-macerating technology to Alto Hospicio. Blanco says that in exchange for securing a contract with Chile, the company promised to hire local workers. But, Blanco admitted, negotiations like these have fallen through in the past. For example, he said, a Spain-based company, Egreen, planned to open a fabric-waste processing plant, but the deal was scrapped late last year.

Read Next How clothing forms the fabric of society, both past and future Eve Andrews

The governor’s sustainability adviser at the Regional Government of Tarapaca, Pablo Zambra, recently formed a 25-member committee that includes stakeholders such as Astudillo and Barria from Dress Desert and Morán, the president of the Tarapacá Recyclers, to publicize economic incentives for circular economy initiatives. Collectively, they hope RETEX will succeed in doing what Zepeda’s company failed to do: turn a profit. As of this writing, no importers are involved.

Meanwhile, every day, container ships continue to offload more cargo. 

In the fall of 2022, Alto Hospicio’s mayor, Ferreira, acknowledged the unsolved problem but blamed clothing manufacturers, citing a “lack of global awareness of ethical responsibility.” 

“Our land has been sacrificed,” he said. 

Pino agrees that the fashion industry and its consumers are culpable. “We have to worry about the complete cycle: before, during, and after our clothes,” she wrote in an editorial published in 2021.

She believes a more comprehensive solution is necessary, including regulating the entry of textile materials to Chile, educating consumers about prolonging garments’ lives, promoting Chile’s homegrown fashion industry, and supporting research to design new uses for fabric waste. 

Ecocitex, founded in 2020 by engineer Rosario Hevia in Santiago, has sprung up as another Chilean company addressing a surfeit of garments.

Ecocitex operates in a manner contrary to the country’s organized and informal secondhand clothes markets. It invites people to recycle high-quality clothing or pay $1.50 per kilogram to leave poor quality clothing and walk away empty-handed.

Bastián Barria, co-founder of the organization Dress Desert with Ángela Astudillo, recently joined a government-sponsored committee to help push forward circular economy initiatives in Chile. Fernando Alarcón

During the pandemic, Andrea Espinoza Pérez, a civil industrial engineer at the University of Santiago, initiated a study on the ecological impacts of projects like Ecocitex. She wanted to know: Did factory-processed, used clothing produce fewer emissions than the original clothing manufacturing process? With data provided by Ecocitex’s founder Hevia, scientists determined that the clothes deconstruction process is effective because it keeps waste clothes out of landfills, and it replaces the demand for virgin materials. While Ecocitex’s procedure is also energy-intensive, the study found, it uses just 73 percent of the energy required to produce the same product from raw materials. 

Meanwhile, neither Zepeda’s Procitex nor Hevia’s Ecocitex in Chile, nor Fabscrap’s efforts in New York and Philadelphia, have matched the direct profitability of Medina’s now-defunct business. (Medina has started a new business storing tires.) In fact, all have relied heavily on a variety of underwriting measures, including subsidies, nonprofit funding, subscriptions, or volunteer labor to generate their products. 

In recent years, Zepeda has earned his living as an employee of Chile’s largest retailer, CENCOSUD. He collects surplus clothes donated by customers, and produces insulation panels for buildings that are sold by the same retailer. 

As for Ecocitex, in June, the business caught fire and the building was destroyed. The cause is still under investigation. Undeterred, Hevia has launched a campaign to rebuild. Meanwhile, she is raising funds by selling blankets made from recycled fibers to a mining company.

By last January, the height of the Chilean summer, the gigantic, unsightly clothes dump at El Paso de la Mula, the one Agence France Presse had shown the world, was nowhere to be found. 

All that remained was a smattering of ashes and the tread marks of bulldozers. Here and there, across Medina’s unofficial backyard, small piles of garments peeked out of the sand dunes. But according to municipal officials, dumping and burning continues. Rey, an indigent man who lives by the side of a desert road in a blue and yellow tent emblazoned with “National Geographic,” attests that he and others accept money from nonprofit refuse-disposal contractors or freelance truckers in exchange for setting fires to whatever waste is discharged from a truck. This way, the trucker can keep more of his hauling profits, which would otherwise be whittled down by the official dump fees.

In the surroundings of Alto Hospicio, in the Atacama Desert, new landfills emerge every day. What arrives is burned by individuals living there. Some of them receive payment for doing it. Fernando Alarcón

Astudillo says that beyond the limits of Manuela’s dune, there are as many as 200 micro-garbage dumps, and consequently, miles and miles of ashes in the desert — not just scattered over the ground, but also in the air. She told Grist in late December that this is an everyday thing. “You go out to buy bread and you smell the burning smell. You smell the materials that make up the clothes: oil and plastic. After 5 in the afternoon, I no longer let my 7-year-old daughter leave the apartment, and I close the windows to prevent smoke from coming in.” She also confirmed the abandoning of clothes continues: “They throw it away, they burn it immediately.”

On December 12, the Primer Tribunal Ambiental de Antofagasta issued its final ruling in the case with Silva, commissioning a unit of experts to carry out an on-site report on the accumulation of textile waste in different areas of Alto Hospicio, and to propose a solution to the accumulation of waste.

The municipality of Alto Hospicio, which claims it does not have the workforce to adequately address the problem, has also installed nearly 100 cameras along the main roads as a means of tracking polluters, and has begun doling out fines as high as $350 for illegal dumping. So far, trucks have been apprehended transporting domestic and industrial garbage, as well as bulky items such as mattresses, washing machines, and furniture. 

Drone footage recorded by Cheng Hwa, one of Pino’s students, the day of the June 2022 fires captures the municipality fighting what was in essence an oil fire. Hwa, who grew up in Iquique and now works in tech for the hospitality industry, had long been aware of the desert dumps but didn’t comprehend the magnitude until he witnessed them at close range. 

Fire blazes through Manuela Medina’s clothes dump in the Atacama Desert on June 12, 2022. Cheng Hwa

He’s haunted by what his drone footage made visible. “How the desert of sand starts to turn into a desert of clothes,” he said. “It has no limit; there is no closure … Clothes begin to appear on the ground until the horizon is completely covered.”

In Iquique, he often glances up toward the high plateau of Alto Hospicio. “You can’t see the dump, but [you can see] the column of smoke on days that [clothes] burn. That cloud of smoke lets you know … It makes [the issue] visible on a day-to-day basis.”

Thirty miles south of Iquique, toward the city’s main airport, on her family’s farm, Astudillo and her parents drop pieces of used clothing on the ground, but in a purposeful way. Over the past 20 years, Astudillo’s father has experimented with growing trees in the infertile, saline soils. Many of his efforts failed until he began using certain fabrics to mulch his trees. This improves the quality of the soil, enabling it to retain moisture. For the past year, Astudillo has been working with one of the Zofri importers, who asked to remain anonymous. She consults with his staff about the clothing bales and recommends ways of sorting the material into specific categories based on fiber content, some of which she collects personally. Those items — a pair of cotton shorts, a T-shirt, a blouse — become mulch for a pine and eucalyptus forest rising in the desert.

Recently, as Astudillo was leaving the farm, she stashed a few perennials in her truck and drove them to Manuela’s compound in Paso de La Mula. Just beyond Medina’s courtyard, where sky- blackening fires had once burned, Astudillo troweled a small hole for the plants. As she dug, she dislodged several odd socks and a faded blue sweatshirt — discarded clothes that had survived the fires, but were buried by bulldozers. 

Astudillo filled the hole, amending the desert sand with compost and garden soil. “For me it’s like a Band-Aid for a wound that is so big in that place,” she said. Then she tucked in cardinal flowers — a native plant whose petals resemble shooting flames. 

Editor’s note: During visits to her compound in Alto Hospicio, Manuela, the owner of the secondhand clothing dump, told Grist reporters her name was Manuela Medina. However, other outlets have used the surname Olivos. Her legal name is Manuela de Los Angeles Medina Olivos. 

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A mountain of used clothes appeared in Chile’s desert. Then it went up in flames. on Jan 4, 2024.

When Kira Roberts moved to Juneau, Alaska, last summer, she immediately noticed how the town of 31,000 changes when the cruise ships dock each morning. Thousands of people pour in, only to vanish by evening. As the season winds down in fall, the parade of buses driving through her neighborhood slows, and the trails near her home and the vast Mendenhall Glacier no longer teem with tourists.

“That unique rhythm of Juneau is really striking to me,” she said. “It’s just kind of crazy to think that this is all a mile from my house.”

But Mendenhall is shrinking quickly: The 13-mile-long glacier has retreated about a mile in the past 40 years. Getting all those tourists to Juneau — some 1.5 million this summer by cruise ship alone — requires burning the very thing contributing to its retreat: fossil fuels.

In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems. 

Heat pumps are “a no-brainer” in Juneau’s mild (for Alaska) winters, said Andy Romanoff, who administers the fund. Juneau’s grid relies on emissions-free hydropower, so electricity is cheaper and less polluting than oil heat. They also save residents money — Roberts said she was paying around $500 a month on heating oil, and has seen her electricity bill climb just $30.

“The financial difference is huge,” she said.

Programs from Monterey, California, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have tried using similar models to finance local renewable or energy-efficiency projects, and carbon offsets for flying and other activities are nothing new. But most of the voluntary market for such things is run by large companies backing distant projects. The fund in Juneau is eager to capitalize on the massive tourist interest in its backyard.

The program, which until recently was called the Juneau Carbon Offset Fund, started in 2019 when members of the advocacy organization Renewable Juneau were discussing how to help Juneau achieve its goal of having renewables provide 80 percent of the city’s energy needs by 2045. The organization’s existing heat pump programs were reaching only the “low-hanging fruit,” Romanoff said: People who had money and were ready to switch for climate reasons alone. It envisioned the fund as a way to get the devices — and the fossil fuel reduction they provide — to more residents. 

Some 1.5 million tourists visited Juneau aboard cruise ships this summer. Many of them visited Mendenhall Glacier, which has retreated about a mile in the past 40 years due to climate change. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images

Romanoff, who also is executive director of the nonprofit Alaska Heat Smart, is aware of the reputational hit carbon offsets have taken lately, but believes the fund’s focus on heat pumps, and working locally, provides transparency and accountability. “It’s a carbon cost that people could actually relate to and understand,” he said.

Many voluntary offset projects overestimate the emissions they’re preventing, sometimes by as much as five to 10 times, said Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project. “Project developers are making methodological choices that give them more credits instead of less,” she said, and those verifying the claims are not enforcing conservative estimates when there’s uncertainty.

The Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund uses three years of utility bills to determine how much oil a recipient was burning before getting a heat pump. It’s paid for 41 installations since 2019, at an average cost of $7,000, and estimates the devices will prevent 3,125 metric tons of carbon emissions over their 15-year lifespans. Those calculations, plus a subsidy from non-tourism donations, brings its carbon price to $46 a ton. 

That’s more expensive than many voluntary credits, but in line with what Haya said are higher-quality projects. “That looks like the cost of real mitigation,” she said. A more fundamental issue is proving any offset project wouldn’t have happened on its own, Haya said. 

Romanoff believes their project meets that condition because the heat pumps go to residents who earn less than 80 percent of the local median income. One of the first recipients, Garri Constantine, lived on far below that when his system was installed. In the three years since, Constantine has become an evangelist for the technology, in part because he no longer spends $300 a month on firewood, trading it for a $50 monthly increase in his electricity bill. 

“I just don’t understand why these things haven’t taken off like wildfire,” he said.

Although the fund has money for future installations, Romanoff said the speed with which it can work is limited by a nationwide shortage of installers. Most of its donations came from the nearby gold mine and the Juneau guiding company Above and Beyond Alaska, but Allen Marine, a regional tour operator, started pitching the fund to passengers this summer and now offers an opt-in donation when booking online. The company considered the fund an opportunity to “give back to the communities that we operate in,” said Travis Mingo, VP of operations. As part of the partnership, the carbon reduction fund agreed to start funding heat pumps in other Allen Marine destinations, like Ketchikan and Sitka.

A much smaller company, Wild Coast Excursions, includes the offset in its prices. When owner Peter Nave’s plan for summer tours on the local ski mountain fell through, he shifted to bear viewing and alpine hiking trips, some of which are far enough away to require helicopter rides. Climate change is especially visible for Nave, a Juneau native who’s seen the dramatic changes in Mendenhall up close and has worked as an avalanche forecaster. He’s covering a 125 percent offset of the climate impact of those excursions, labeling his company “carbon-negative.” He estimates that will end up being about 1 percent of the price of each tour. In his mind, it’s simply a cost of doing business.

“I kind of rationalized that if I could offset more than we would use, then I could feel a little bit better about taking on [the helicopter] strategy,” he said.

He’s skeptical of offsets in general, but the tangibility of this program made a difference. “I could see the reduction happening, because I know the heat pumps work, my friends have them, people I know install them,” he said.

Wild Coast Excursions’ contribution to the carbon reduction fund in the first year is unlikely to cover even one heat pump, however. Including cruise ships or major airlines in the program would make a far more significant dent in Juneau’s emissions. Romanoff said his organization had an initial conversation with a local representative of a major cruise company, but was told it wouldn’t participate if the fund only benefits Juneau and the offsets weren’t verified by a third party.

The Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund began pursuing verification with Verra, the world’s largest certifier of voluntary credits by volume, but walked away because of the cost and its own discomfort over negative press coverage. “We could install five or six heat pumps with that money,” Romanoff said.

Offsets are one tool cruise companies consider “on a case-by-case basis,” to hit their own emissions goals, said Lanie Downs, a spokeswoman for Cruise Lines International Association Alaska. 

Carnival Plc, which owns three cruise companies operating in Alaska, said it will consider carbon offsets only if energy efficiency options have been exhausted. The other two major cruise lines that regularly dock in Juneau did not respond to requests for comment, but do list offset purchases in their annual sustainability reports.

While the city charges cruise lines a per-head passenger fee, that revenue can be used only for specific projects in the port area. Alexandra Pierce, Juneau’s tourism manager, said the city has “never formally proposed any emissions fees,” on cruise ships, but pointed to the industry’s involvement in efforts to reduce cruise line emissions and install electric shore power, the marine equivalent of stopping idling emissions.

Allen Marine has “started discussions” about including an offset fee in its tours sold through cruise lines. “As we go through contract renewals, it will actually start to snowball effect the amount of money we’re able to receive for this program,” Mingo said. But ultimately, that leaves the bulk of tourists’ emissions — the cruises — unaccounted for.

Romanoff gets a few emails a year from people in other parts of Alaska and the Lower 48 interested in setting up their own offset funds. He thinks his organization’s model could be replicated in places with plenty of oil heating systems to replace. That said, a carbon price based on replacing gas-powered heat might be too expensive for most people, he said.

But in the Alaskan panhandle, he thinks a “groundswell” of support from small businesses could make a difference in getting the cruise lines on board. “Once we build that arsenal to a certain size, then I think that’ll speak pretty loud and clear,” he said.

This story has been updated.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Juneau, Alaska, a carbon offset project that’s actually working on Jan 4, 2024.

Amid a wider social justice reckoning, some scientists are calling for scrapping species names that honor people considered objectionable, including dictators and enslavers, or use offensive words. Others question whether such a monumental effort is worthwhile or even possible.

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