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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category Q&A.
  • Fighting the Flood of Nurdles: Texas Fisherwoman takes on Taiwan Plastic Company

    ›
    China Environment Forum  //  Q&A  //  September 29, 2022  //  By Ruoyi (Angela) Pan
    Diane Wilson

    Over decades, billions of small lentil-sized plastic pellets, called nurdles, flooded out of the wastewater pipes of Formosa Plastic’s plant in Calhoun Texas into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman in a rural fishing town called Seadrift, has been tracking and collecting data on the company’s nurdle pollution. In 2019, after three years of constant sampling, she and her scrappy volunteers won a dramatic legal victory with a consent decree mandating 50 million in penalties for past pollution and fines if they do not clean up previous pollution or maintain zero discharge of plastic.

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  • Silatech’s Hassan Al-Mulla on Tackling Youth Unemployment in the MENA Region

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    Q&A  //  May 6, 2022  //  By Claire Doyle
    51063056458_ac0b6a78fc_c

    The MENA region is experiencing a confluence of stressors, from ongoing instability to intensifying climate-related issues like water insecurity. At the recent Doha Forum, ECSP’s Lauren Risi sat down with Hassan Al-Mulla, CEO of Silatech, to discuss what his organization—an international non-profit NGO focusing on youth economic empowerment—is doing to address some of these challenges.

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  • Merging the Environmental and Security Sectors in Climate Risk Responses

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    Guest Contributor  //  Q&A  //  January 3, 2022  //  By Alexis Eberlein
    Šabac,,Serbia,-,May,18,,2014:,People,Put,Sandbags,To

    Environmental security notions have evolved over the past 30 years. Once a sub-field of Security and Peace Studies focusing on how environmental issues correlate with modern security theories and policies, the concept is rapidly merging environmental and security sectors. Former Greek Naval Officer in the Hellenic Navy and current environmental security scholar Dimitrios Kantemnidis’ expertise sits at the center of the two merging fields. His military background informs perspectives on growing environmental security risks and potential responses for civilian and military actors.

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  • Hitting the Brakes on Plastics in China’s Food Delivery Industry: Q&A with Zheng Xue and Sherry Lu of Plastic Free China

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    China Environment Forum  //  Q&A  //  November 4, 2021  //  By Solange Reppas, Mingwei Zhu, Tongxin Zhu & McKenna Potter
    Shanghai,,China,-,Apr,2,,2020:,Deliveryman,From,Food,Delivery

    In every Chinese city, there is an army of motorcycles and mopeds weaving through the traffic jams, and sometimes even venturing on sidewalks, to deliver millions of food and e-commerce orders each day. Meituan, one of China’s most popular food delivery apps, delivers 30 million orders a day, serving up 100 million plastic containers. According to Greenpeace, e-commerce and express delivery in China generated 9.4 million tons of packaging waste in 2018 and will likely triple to 41.3 million tons by 2025.

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  • Grassroots Action to Combat Plastics in Asian Rivers: A Conversation with ECOTON Founders Daru Setyorini and Prigi Arisandi

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    China Environment Forum  //  Q&A  //  July 29, 2021  //  By Ruyi Li & Mingwei Zhu
    Evakuapok_15 (1)

    In Sidoarjo City, Indonesia, student river detectives catalog the microplastics they sample from the Brantas River, the longest river in East Java. Plastic waste threatens this water that seventeen million people depend on for drinking water, fishing, and irrigation. Daru Setyorini and her team from ECOTON (Ecological Observation and Wetlands Conservation) organized this program to educate youth and inform policymakers on the scope of the problem. 

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  • Building an On-ramp for Catalytic Capital to Reduce Plastic Leakage: Q&A with Circulate Capital’s April Crow

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    China Environment Forum  //  Q&A  //  April 1, 2021  //  By Ruyi Li
    Waste plastic bottles from automobile oils and beverages

    Back in 2005, as a part of the Coca-Cola Company Environmental Team, April Crow was a pioneer working on the concept of sustainable packaging. In the mid-2000s, despite stories on the great pacific garbage patch, ocean plastic waste was not high on policy or corporate agendas. April believed this was due to a lack of scientific data on the scale and threat of plastic waste. To fill this gap, April’s team partnered with Ocean Conservancy to convene leading scientists to help fill these knowledge gaps. Their research found the majority of marine plastic pollution stemmed from five Asian countries that lacked waste management infrastructure, which if fully in place, could reduce leakage by 45 percent. This insight raised a challenging question—how can companies and aid agencies bring funding to these markets to facilitate better infrastructure and prevent plastic leakage?

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  • Championing Ecological Health and Environmental Justice in Plastic Action: Q&A with Judith Enck, Founder of Beyond Plastics

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    China Environment Forum  //  Q&A  //  March 25, 2021  //  By Clare Auld-Brokish & Tongxin Zhu
    New York Plastic Waste

    “There is one thing I think about a lot: how do you get people active on plastic waste? How do you structure having impact?”

    Judith Enck discovered her interest in environmental activism when she interned in college for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) and was asked to lobby for the Returnable Container Act (commonly referred to as the Bottle Bill), which had stalled for 10 years. The difficulty she faced in lobbying for this relatively simple bill motivated her to return for a second internship. After graduation, she abandoned plans for social work or law school to return to environmental advocacy and quickly became the executive director of Environmental Advocates NY. The bill eventually became a New York State law in 1982 and has since prevented the unnecessary export or landfilling of billions of plastic bottles. Judith learned important lessons from that victory and has been making her mark on America’s waste policy ever since. 

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  • Building Local Capacity for Zero-Waste in the Philippines: Q&A with Break Free From Plastic’s Former Asia-Pacific Coordinator Beau Baconguis

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    China Environment Forum  //  Q&A  //  March 11, 2021  //  By Ruyi Li & Clare Auld-Brokish

    ANGONO, RIZAL, PHILIPPINES - JULY 4 2018: Workers of a materials recovery facility sort through plastic waste and segregate them for proper recycling.

    Large pollution can come in small packages. This is the case with the small plastic pouches, called sachets, that constitute a major source of the plastic waste crisis plaguing the Philippines, a country ranked third in the world for ocean plastic leakage. Filipino consumers throw away a staggering 163 million of these difficult-to-recycle plastic packets each day, which adds up to about 60 billion a year, enough to carpet 130,000 soccer fields.

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