Tag: pollution

As the ocean waters rise, so do the islands of garbage

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26 July 2019 —  The Tricontinental

The Thirtieth Newsletter (2019)

by

Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Twelve-year-old Aeshnina Azzahra’s letter to Donald Trump.

Twelve-year-old Aeshnina Azzahra’s letter to Donald Trump. (click to enlarge)

On 12 July 2019, a twelve-year-old girl from Gresik (Indonesia), Aeshnina Azzahra, wrote a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump. The letter was delivered to the U.S. embassy in Jakarta and released to the press. ‘My country’, she wrote, ‘is the second largest contributor to waste. And some of that waste is your waste’. Then, she asked three powerful and sincere questions: ‘Why do you always export your waste to my country? Why don’t you take care of your own waste? Why do we have to feel the impact of your waste?’

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Exposing the Dirty Business Behind the Designer Label By Michelle Chen

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19 May 2019 — Truthout

Fashion is the world’s second-most polluting industry after the oil industry

Even before it gets worn once, that new T-shirt you bought is already dirtier than you can imagine. It’s soaked through with toxic waste, factory smog and plastic debris—all of which is likely just a few spin cycles away from an incinerator, or maybe a landfill halfway around the world. Our obsession with style rivals our hunger for oil, making fashion the world’s second-most polluting industry after the oil industry.

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Inspections and pollution tests drop as Environment Agency sheds thousands of staff

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22 December 2018 — True Publica
Inspections and pollution tests drop as Environment Agency sheds thousands of staffBy Zach Boren and Russell Scott: The number of site inspections by England’s environmental regulator has fallen by more than a third over the past four years, an Unearthed analysis has found.

Conservation experts told Unearthed the cutbacks – which have come at a time of rapid staffing cuts at the Environment Agency (EA) – had hampered efforts to revive the country’s dirty rivers and depleted fish stocks.

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It’s time to break up capitalism’s love affair with plastic By Amy Leather

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9 November 2018 — Climate & Capitalism

A valuable invention is massively misused in the service of profit, producing unprecedented waste and pollution. How can we stop the plastic plague?

Plastic is bad, isn’t it? That is certainly the new consensus. And no wonder there has been a public outcry. Many of us have been shocked by images like those on Blue Planet of a sperm whale with a stomach full of plastic waste, albatrosses feeding their young plastic or turtles trapped in plastic bags.

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CAPITALISM COULD COST US THE EARTH!

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8 October 2018 — The Planning Motive

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just released its report on Global Warning. Global temperatures broke through the 1 Degree barrier in 2017 and will breach the planet altering threshold of +1.5 Degrees sometime in the next ten to twenty years. The IPCC has produced a vivid graph showing the thresholds:report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_fig1.pdfThe only important point to come out of this report is that capitalism is not slowing down this rise, never mind reversing it. It confirms that capitalism is putting society together with the planet, in harm’s way.

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Sadiq Khan’s ‘T-Charge’ to tackle air pollution is essentially a nonsense. Here’s why

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24 October 2017 — The Canary

“100 companies produce 71% of the world’s total greenhouse gases”

On Monday 23 October, the ‘T-Charge’ came into force in London. It is a scheme from Mayor Sadiq Khan to try and tackle air pollution. But analysis of the charge on older vehicles shows that, in fact, it will do very little to tackle the crisis that kills over 9,000 people a year in London.

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