WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) – The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021 as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday.
Fashion accounts for 10% of the world’s carbon emissions and is the second-most polluting industry in the world. But in an increasingly climate-conscious society, it is increasingly trying to present itself as sustainable to appeal to customers.
One big target is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for the past two decades many brands have signed up to a scheme called the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent body that awards grades for environmental performance.
TO MAKE PROGRESS, some researchers say, the budding field needs to focus less on the network’s properties and more on its human nodes. Like viruses, misinformation needs people to spread, Tufekci says. “So what you want to really do is study the people end of it,” including people’s reasons for clicking Like or Retweet, and whether misinformation changes their behavior and beliefs.
That’s also difficult to study, however. At UW’s Center for an Informed Public, billions of online conversations are captured every year. If a certain piece of misinformation is identified, “you can go about measuring how it’s amplified, how fast it grows, who’s amplifying it,” says West, who directs the center. “But it is very difficult to see whether that translates into behavior, and not just behavior, but beliefs.”
A review of 45 studies on misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, recently published as a preprint by researchers in Norway, concluded that—although misinformation was rampant—there were few high-quality studies of its effects. “There is a need for more robust designs to become more certain regarding the actual effect of social media misinformation on vaccine hesitancy,” the authors concluded.
Scientists have tried to study the issue by isolating a very small part of the problem. A recent paper in Nature Human Behaviour, for example, reported the results of an experiment conducted in September 2020, before COVID-19 vaccines became available. Researchers asked 4000 people in both the United Kingdom and the United States whether they planned to get vaccinated, exposed them to either facts or false information about the vaccines in development, then measured their intent again. In both countries, exposure to misinformation led to a decline of six percentage points in the share of people saying they would “definitely” accept a vaccine.
Corporations love to talk about what they are doing to combat climate change. In TV ads and sustainability reports, corporations tout their efforts to increase efficiency, utilize clean energy, and ultimately achieve “net-zero” emissions.
But as Popular Information previously reported, these claims are often misleading and incomplete. A February report by the NewClimate Institute of 25 major corporations that pledged to reach net-zero found they have collectively made commitments to reduce just 20% of their current carbon footprint by 2040. The NewClimate Institute also found many of the plans to reach net-zero contain “subtle details and loopholes” that allow significant carbon emissions to continue or rely on dubious carbon offsets that do not actually contribute to carbon emissions reductions.
Amazon, for example, presents itself as a corporate leader on climate change. It even purchased the naming rights for the home of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and called it “Climate Pledge Arena.” But the NewClimate Institute’s report found that Amazon’s pledge to reach net-zero emissions “remains unsubstantiated without any explicit reduction target for the company’s own emissions.” Amazon provides almost no information on so-called “Scope 3” emissions, which includes emissions from the goods sold by Amazon.
Consumers are being duped into paying a premium for fashion products that make grand claims about their environmental credentials but have no evidence to back them up, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has said as it prepares to name and shame high street clothing companies.
Entire lines of clothing are being labelled “sustainable” and “eco-friendly”, without the company having proof that the whole process – from manufacture to delivery, packaging and sale – is good for the environment, according to the CMA.
The CMA is investigating claims by Britain’s fashion sector and will shortly have a list of the worst offenders. It is investigating sector by sector, with the packaged food industry and supermarkets likely to be next.
