The Governments of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Viet Nam have joined forces to fight chemical pollution today, launching a joint $43-million programme to manage and reduce hazardous chemicals in their textile industries.
Employing over 10 million people, the four nations’ textile sectors account for near 15% of global clothing exports. However, the economic benefits of the industry come at a cost, with the sector being one of the world’s major users of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a family of approximately 12,000 synthetic chemicals which do not break down and accumulate in the environment, threatening human and ecosystem health.
Wet processing factories, where materials are turned into fabrics through bleaching, printing, dyeing, finishing and laundering typically use 0.58 kg of chemical inputs for every 1 kg of fabric produced. These compounds leak into the environment at all phases of the textile lifecycle, from production to use, disposal and recycling.
Led by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), with the financial backing of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the support of the Basel & Stockholm Convention Regional Centre South-East Asia and the Natural Resources Defence Council, the Reducing uses and releases of chemicals of concern in the textiles sector programme will provide technical support and tools for SMEs and manufacturers to improve their knowledge and management of hazardous chemicals, guiding them to manage risks to workers, and eventually eliminate the worst chemicals from their production processes.
“The textile sector is a major user of toxic ‘forever chemicals’ which pollute local and global ecosystems,” UNEP Chemicals and Waste Programme Officer Eloise Touni said.
“While governments have agreed global bans of the worst chemicals through the Stockholm Convention on POPs, value chains still use thousands of hazardous chemicals like PFAS. UNEP is proud to work with governments and front-runner companies to scale up best practices and phase out chemicals of concern across the whole sector”.
The five-year programme will bring the four countries together to align public policy on the textile sector with international best practice, including on supply chain transparency, investment for chemical management and eco-innovation, and occupational health and safety, creating the enabling environment needed to phase out PFAS and other chemicals of concern.
General Manager of Corporate Sustainability and Chemical Management at Pakistani textile manufacturer Interloop Limited Fauz Ul Azeem said processing mills often lack the awareness and technical expertise needed to manage chemicals according to best practices.
“For any production facility, phasing out any chemical from the running inventory is a painful task,” Mr Ul Azeem said. “They need to realign all the running processes after a careful analysis of quality, regulatory and cost impacts.”
“This project will help stakeholders to understand upcoming global mandatory requirements and how a pro-active approach can help them avoid a business impact. It will help them learn that considering environmental impacts in their decision making can lead to long term benefits”.
Senior Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Climate Change in Pakistan, Syed Mujtaba Hussain said the country was keenly aware of the need to reform the textile industry in order to reduce its environmental impacts and meet Pakistan’s international obligations.
“The textile wet processing stage is an environmental ‘hotspot’ in terms of water pollution, ecosystem, human health and climate impacts due to the high use of chemicals and of fossil fuel-derived energy,” Mr Hussain said.
“We welcome this project, which will help this important sector to reduce its pollution while accessing new markets for continued growth.”
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Head out of the city and escape to the countryside. Soon, the road narrows, the lights dim and the human settlements get further and further apart. You stop and listen. Silence. Urban sprawl is replaced by fields and farms. You could be in a different world.
Such neat depictions of the boundaries between town and country have existed through the ages, but they are changing. Scattered and dispersed urban growth has created large, part-urban, part-rural peri-urban (hinterland) areas. New technologies have enabled new trends, such as people who live in the countryside and work in the city.
If there are lessons for public officials in harnessing stronger rural-urban connections, there might also be applications in learning from pastoralist communities around the world. So said Ian Scoones, who for three decades has been leading research about what this group might teach us in terms of responding to uncertainties.
‘Pastoralists are livestock keepers, small-scale sheep farmers, cattle herders – people who make use of highly variable rangelands, often through mobile practices,’ said Scoones, who is Professor of Environment and Development at the Institute of Development Studies (UK) and coordinator of the EU-funded PASTRES project.
‘These people are marginal in terms of economics, politics, and resources, but there are hundreds of millions of them and the rangelands they make use of have nearly half the world’s land surface,’ he said. While there are few examples of pastoralists influencing policies, Scoones believes there is untapped potential.
‘Rural and urban areas are not that distinct nowadays,’ says Han Wiskerke, Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wageningen in The Netherlands. ‘They intersect and interact. Urban areas expand to the suburbs and there’s increased economic activity in greenbelt areas.’
From 2017 to 2021, Wiskerke coordinated the EU-funded ROBUST project – a pan-European, EU-funded project focused on unlocking synergies between rural, urban, and peri-urban areas. A key focus was creating stronger relationships between neighbouring rural-urban communities to help them envisage shared plans for sustainable growth.
ROBUST’s Living Lab in Graz (Austria) helped increase public transport provision in peri-urban areas, driving down car use. The team achieved this by bringing together local government officials, businesses and NGOs to analyse the effects of an enhanced regional transport system on citizens’ behaviour.
‘These areas are increasingly interconnected in terms of populations and activities, yet there is often still a divide when it comes to how policies are determined,’ said Wiskerke. ‘We looked for common areas of interest, where communities were interdependent, and tried to identify ways they might better support each another.’
Through the project, ROBUST examined governance and decision-making processes in 11 city regions. Its ‘living labs’ concept spanned Europe, from Lisbon to Ljubljana. Living labs were forums which brought together politicians, researchers, businesses, service providers and citizens to co-create a local action plan.
These were complemented by ‘communities of practice’, organised around priority topics such as business models, public infrastructure, and ecosystem services. By bringing together individuals facing similar challenges across Europe, they could share information and experiences of implementing change.
Through the work of ROBUST’s Living Lab in Ljubljana (Slovenia), a new sustainable meal programme was offered in city schools, providing nutritious food sourced from local farms. Not only did this cut down food miles and provide opportunities for local farmers, it also enabled food literacy and education opportunities for pupils.
And in Gloucestershire (UK), the Living Lab reduced the effects of flooding in the City of Gloucester by looking at nature-based environmental interventions in rural areas too.
‘This project really highlighted how if we take care of our countryside, our countryside can take care of our cities,’ said Wiskerke.
The PASTRES project under Ian Scoones led a global team investigating how pastoralists across six different sites in six countries – China, India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tunisia and Italy – each deal with uncertainty. Scoones wants to know what broader implications this might have for responding to global challenges in non-pastoralist settings.
Scoones thinks we need to look to how pastoralists organise and respond in real-time in the face of uncertainties including environmental ones. ‘This is what pastoralists do. If there’s a drought they talk to people, they move, they adapt. They don’t try to control the system,’ he said.
Responding to environmental uncertainties is only one area where Scoones believes we can learn from pastoralists. There could also be applications for rethinking insurance and social welfare systems, and in responding to health emergencies, like the Covid-19 pandemic.
He explained, ‘what we learnt from the pandemic is very similar to how pastoralists respond to uncertainty of a specific sort. The way the pandemic response happened most effectively was through people – informal networks who really helped to manage the uncertainty, responding, adapting, and dealing with challenges.’
Through the PASTRES project his team of researchers – PhD students, most of them originally from pastoral areas – lived within communities carrying out qualitative and ethnographic research to understand more about people’s way of life, the challenges they faced and their decision-making in response.
An important element of the work was a ‘photo-voice’ initiative – a research method which allowed pastoralists to record their own perspectives and reflect on their own settings. ‘We gave people cameras to document uncertainties in their lives, and they even shared images and ideas via WhatsApp,’ explained Scoones.
These images and stories from pastoralists were shared via the website Seeing Pastoralism and an exhibition which has already been displayed in Kenya, Stockholm and as part of COP26 in Glasgow. Later this year it will reach Brussels and go on display at the European Commission.
Back to ROBUST and longer-term, Wiskerke now hopes that by highlighting examples where positive local actions have been achieved, seeds can be sown for more integrated policymaking between rural and urban areas elsewhere.
The final ROBUST ‘manifesto’ report calls for much greater urban / rural collaboration across all policy areas. ‘Rural and urban areas are interdependent, and I hope this project facilitates much greater collaborative policymaking between them in the future,’ said Wiskerke.
‘Tackling our shared challenges – from improving public services to responding to climate change – needs to be about this kind of inclusive development.’
Research in this article was funded via the EU’s European Research Council (ERC). This material was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
Greater investment in sustainable food cold chains is needed to reduce hunger, provide livelihoods to communities, and adapt to climate change, two UN agencies said in a report published on Saturday.
These systems are critical to maintaining the quality, nutritional value and safety of food, especially as an estimated 14 per cent of all food produced for human consumption is lost before it even reaches consumers.
The increased investment is also required if the world is to meet the challenge of feeding an additional two billion people by mid-century.
The report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was launched at the COP27 climate change conference underway in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
“At a time when the international community must act to address the climate and food crises, sustainable food cold chains can make a massive difference,” said Inger Andersen, the UNEP Executive Director.
“They allow us to reduce food loss, improve food security, slow greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, reduce poverty and build resilience – all in one fell swoop.”
Food waste is happening as the number of hungry people worldwide rose to 828 million in 2021, or 46 million more than in the previous year.
In 2020, nearly 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet, up 112 million from 2019, as the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic drove up inflation. This year, the war in Ukraine has threatened global food security.
The report argues that developing countries could save a staggering 144 million tonnes of food annually if they reached the same level of food cold chain infrastructure as richer nations.
Sustainable food cold chains can also make an important difference in efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to FAO Director-General Dongyu Qu.
“All stakeholders can help implement the findings of this report, to transform agrifood systems to be more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable – for better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life for all, leaving no one behind,” he said.
The food cold chain has serious implications for climate change and the environment, the report revealed.
Emissions from food loss and waste due to lack of refrigeration totalled around one gigatonne of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2017, or roughly two percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
Food loss also increases the unnecessary conversion of land for agricultural purposes, as well as use of water, fossil fuels and energy.
Reducing food loss and waste could make a positive impact on climate change, the report said, but only if new infrastructure is designed that uses gases with low global warming potential.
Sustainable food cold chains are already making a difference in countries such as India, where a pilot project reduced kiwi fruit losses of by 76 per cent while reducing emissions through expansion of the use of refrigerated transport.
The report contains recommendations that include quantifying the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in existing food cold chains, establishing benchmarks, and identifying opportunities for reductions.
Authorities also can implement and enforce ambitious minimum efficiency standards, as well as monitoring and enforcement, to prevent illegal imports of inefficient food cold chain equipment and refrigerants.
Urgent action is needed to reduce material use in key industries to avoid unprecedented climate change, according to new research by Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) and Eunomia Research & Consulting.
Failure to act soon could mean exhausting the remaining carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be released and still limit global warming to 1.5°C, by as early as 2028. In 2015 world leaders agreed to keep warming to within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels which would limit the worst environmental effects such as floods, droughts, extreme heatwaves, food scarcity and biodiversity loss.
A business-as-usual approach to materials production, which accounts for a quarter of global emissions, could contribute to warming of up to 2.5oC. Current industry net zero roadmaps are projected to still not meet the target, resulting in warming of up to 2oC. Early adoption of proven emission reduction practices, such as the decarbonisation of energy grids, should be made a priority in the near-term as the impact of deploying technologies after 2030 will be substantially less effective.
More key findings of the report ‘Is Net Zero Enough for the Materials Sector?’:
• Significant capital investment is needed to achieve electricity decarbonisation in the aluminium sector. • The cement and concrete sectors rely heavily on unproven technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. • Retrofitting existing systems in the iron and steel sectors with best available efficiency technologies provides the greatest emissions reduction and could be implemented immediately. • Remaining within their carbon budget will be a significant challenge for the plastics industry as a drastic shift away from fossil fuels to bio-based materials is needed. Joan Marc Simon, Executive Director of Zero Waste Europe said: “In view of the ongoing climate negotiations, decarbonisation strategies are insufficient to limit global warming to 1.5C. The only way forward is to reduce resource consumption, particularly in the Global North. Businesses, governments and civil society should come together and act urgently to make the best of resources available and deploy proven technologies to decarbonise the economy.”
Eunomia’s Simon Hann, lead author of the research, concluded: “We often hear about the importance of keeping to 1.5oC and this essential piece of work helps to demonstrate what that could mean in practice for the materials we all consume. Slowly decarbonising for the next 30 years is evidently not enough and there is a clear need to change the way we think about material production and consumption. Bold and decisive near-term action from policy makers and industry leaders is therefore essential to make this happen.”
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