AFP

The aviation sector is facing a great dilemma: How can it fulfil its ambition of doubling passenger numbers while meeting its goal of reducing its massive greenhouse gas emissions?

Slashing pollution from the industry is among the major challenges facing the world as leaders meet later this month for a key climate summit in Britain.

– How bad is it? –

Airlines transported 4.5 billion passengers in 2019, belching out in the process 900 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to two percent of total global emissions.

Passenger numbers are projected to double by 2050, meaning a parallel doubling of CO2 if no action is taken.

While the sector has sought to increase carbon efficiency, it has increasingly faced pressure from environmentalists and social movements such as “Flygskam” (“flight shame”), which appeared in Sweden in 2018.

Between 2009 and 2019, carriers improved their energy efficiency by 21.4 percent, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). But that was not enough to prevent the sector’s emissions from rising.

– What are the pledges? –

The IATA committed itself earlier this month to zero net emissions of CO2 by 2050, after having previously targeted a cut of just 50 percent. 

A group representing European airlines, airports and aerospace companies has made a similar commitment.

At state level, the European Union hopes to cut emissions by 55 percent compared with 1990 levels by 2030, aviation included.

The United States intends to slash the sector’s emissions share by a fifth by the end of this decade.

– What’s the flight plan? – 

The European group of airlines, airports and aerospace companies hopes half the emissions targets can be met with more fuel-efficient engines, the emergence of hydrogen and electric propulsion, and a better management of air traffic.

But the IATA says such measures would contribute to just 14 percent of the effort.

Plans to reach the net zero target also rely on carbon offsetting schemes, such as planting trees, which NGOs say do not address the problem.

– Role of sustainable fuel – 

“If there’s a ‘silver bullet’ to decarbonising aviation, it’s sustainable aviation fuels (SAF),” says Brian Moran, Boeing’s vice-president of sustainability public policy.

The IATA hopes to accomplish two-thirds of its emissions reductions by using SAFs — non-conventional fuels derived from organic products including cooking oil and algae.

The European Commission will require that SAFs account for at least two percent of aviation kerosene by 2025, rising to five percent by 2030 and 63 percent by 2050.

Aviation giants Boeing and Airbus say their planes will be burning 100 percent SAFs by the end of this decade.

SAFs, which is four times more expensive than kerosene, accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the fuel used in aviation in 2019.

The United States is proposing a tax credit to encourage SAF use while the EU wants to put a new levy on kerosene for flights within the 27-nation bloc.

– Is it doable? –

Biomass fuels are a limited resource.

“We have estimated that by 2050, advanced biofuel from residue (will) allow for covering (just) 11 percent of aviation’s needs,” says Jo Dardenne of the European NGO federation Transport et Environnement (T&E).

The aviation sector is also betting on synthetic fuels, or e-fuels, made with hydrogen produced from renewable sources of energy and with CO2 captured from the atmosphere.

E-fuels are supposed to be the main type of SAF in the future.

But Timur Gul, head of energy technology policy at the International Energy Agency, says replacing just 10 percent of oil-based jet fuel with e-fuels would require the equivalent of electricity production from Spain and France combined.

Dardenne says the technologies being considered to reduce emissions require a lot of energy. What is needed, he says, is to “reduce demand” — meaning to fly less.

US special climate envoy John Kerry on Monday praised Mexico’s efforts to fight global warming.

Visiting a reforestation program in the southern state of Chiapas together with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Kerry said that combatting climate change “cannot be achieved without reforestation and dealing with deforestation.”

“All of us in the world need to focus in what Lopez Obrador is trying to do,” Kerry added. 

One million hectares of trees have been replanted as part of the “Sembrando Vida” (“Sowing Life”) program, according to the Mexican government.

Kerry praised the program, saying that it focuses “on people, on people lives, on work, on the ability to be able of stay where you live, on the ability of stay connected to the land as part of the future”.

The Mexican president said Sembrando Vida, which has been replicated in El Salvador and Honduras, creates jobs and thus helps contain migration to the United States through Mexico.

Kerry visited Mexico before flying to London ahead of the COP26 UN climate summit which begins on October 31 in Glasgow. 

If concrete were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth, behind only China and the United States.

How can this material, essential for global housing, construction and infrastructure, be made less damaging to the planet?

– How bad can it be? –

Cement is the most utilised material on Earth, consumed to make concrete at a rate of some 150 tonnes each second.

According to the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA), around 14 billion cubic metres of concrete are cast each year.

Cement production alone accounts for as much as seven percent of global CO2 emissions — three times the emissions produced by aviation.

“That’s more than all the emissions from the European Union or India, just behind those of China and the US,” Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a key contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told AFP. 

And with ever-growing urbanisation rates in Africa and Asia, the planetary impact of this elementary building material is only likely to grow.

– How does cement emit CO2? –

Cement is the main binder that holds together the pebbles and stones in concrete. It is primarily made of clinker, a residue produced by firing clay and limestone in a furnace. 

When it is heated, CO2 is produced.

In order to manufacture one tonne of cement, the process of firing to 1,400 degrees Celsius produces roughly one tonne of CO2.

This chemical reaction, which has stayed unaltered since cement was first manufactured over 200 years ago, is responsible for 70 percent of the sector’s emissions.

The remaining 30 percent comes from the energy used to fire the furnaces themselves.

– How to reduce emissions? –

The concrete industry has said it wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. In October it set the objective of reducing its emissions “an additional 25 percent” by 2030.

This would save some five billion tonnes of CO2 over the course of the decade. 

Purging the sector of CO2 emissions is heavily reliant on technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCUS) which have yet to be deployed at any meaningful scale. 

But it also proposes changes such as recycling old concrete and replacing hydrocarbons in its blast furnaces with biofuels.

State-run behemoths such as the China National Building Material Company have promised to “play their part” in the industry’s decarbonisation.

At the other end of the scale, several start-ups are coming up with new ways to save emissions.

US-based Solidia plans to capture CO2 and use it to dry out the concrete mix, minimising the amount of water needed in production. 

In Canada, CarbonCure is exploring how to inject liquified CO2 into concrete and store it there.

Perhaps most importantly, the industry is banking on developing new “green” cements, made from recycled materials.

In Britain, 26 percent of concrete is already manufactured in this way, according to the GCCA.

In May France, which is home to several major concrete firms, issued new cement production regulations.

Starting next year, all new buildings will be subject to carbon restrictions for the duration of their lives, from construction to demolition. 

– Is ‘green’ cement the future?

As things stand most green cements are being made by new producers; traditional manufacturers say it will take time for them to modernise their existing machinery.

One such start up, Hoffman Green Cement, makes cement in France from industrial waste: clay sludge, blast furnace slag and fly ash, which is a by-product from coal burning.

Even with a price tag 25 euros (29 dollars) more expensive per square metre, demand is high, says founder Julien Blanchard.

“The cement industry plans to eliminate its emissions in 2050,” he told AFP. 

“With our breakthrough solutions, we can get them starting now.”

The stakes for the planet are high: the UN estimates that three quarters of the world’s infrastructure by 2050 has yet to be built. 

It is a sign of the times that last week’s declaration by the Williams Formula One team of its aim to become a climate-positive organisation by 2030, was greeted in muted terms.

It is, of course, a welcome ambition within a sport that guzzles gas and runs up massive bills in flying teams around the world for over 20 races a year but it seems to be very much in line with the way sport is going in 2021.

As world leaders prepare to gather in Glasgow for the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, so sports administrators are having to consider new ideas to cut waste and save the planet. 

They know by now that it means doing more than simply planting trees by the thousands, manufacturing seats for spectators from recycled plastic or minting medals from used materials.

They know it needs more radical change to recreate a genuinely green playing field.

Credit should be given to some like Forest Green Rovers whose sustainability measures include solar panels, electric car charging points, water recycling, an electric lawnmower, an organic pitch, and an entirely vegan menu for players and fans, prompted FIFA to describe them as “the world’s greenest football club”.

They are the exception. Until now, administrators have largely preferred words to action.

Next year’s big sporting events, the Winter Olympics in Beijing and the World Cup in Qatar, are among the biggest culprits. 

Since 1995, the environment has been included in the Olympic charter and in 2016 the International Olympic Committee established a working group to seek ways to make Winter Games “more sustainable and less impactful in financial, operational and environmental terms”.

That will not prevent questions being asked about the artificial snow on the ski slopes at the Winter Olympics in February.

Meanwhile, the World Cup is to be played in the heat of Qatar which, despite moving the tournament to November and December, has necessitated the installation of air conditioning, which emits harmful gases into the atmosphere, in eight stadiums.

– Green pressure –

If the most commercial end of the sporting world is still largely environmentally unsustainable — the 2018 Ryder Cup in France evaluated its water footprint to be equivalent to 197 Olympic swimming pools – there has at least been some movement.

The Williams announcement is the first from an F1 team to align with the UN’s Sports for Climate Action Framework and also fits with Formula 1’s goal, established in 2019, of carbon neutrality by 2030.

“Today, there is more and more pressure on the organisers,” says Didier Lehenaff, who launched the “Eco-Games” in 2004.

An ex-president of the European Triathlon Union, Lehenaff says he “switched to the green side” in the 2000s and committed to “making the sport more eco-compatible”.

He also notes that the Tour de France “has set up areas to throw away waste” and is now punishing recalcitrant teams. 

In 2019, the race was dubbed the ‘Tour de Plastique’ because an estimated 15 million items of single-use plastic were dispensed to crowds by sponsors. 

– Supporters –

And therein lies another problem. It is not just the cars whizzing around the circuit or the transport of athletes that is the problem, it is the spectators. 

In non-Covid days, thousands travel across countries for events each week and others board planes to major international events. 

Jerome Lachaze, who looks after social and environmental responsibility at the Le Mans 24 Hours car race, estimates 250,000 people head to the town in northwest France each year and is working to encourage greater use of trains.

He also points out that Le Mans cars will have “100 percent renewable fuel” in 2022 which, according to manufacturers Total Energies, should allow their CO2 emissions to be cut by at least 65 percent.

Appropriately the fuel will be made from French wine residues and ETBE (ethyl tertbutyl ether).

“The pressure is now coming from the sponsors,” Lachaze told AFP.

“They say ‘what is your CSR (corporate social responsibility) strategy?’ And if you do not have this strategy, I will no longer finance you’.”

– ‘Assess, reduce, compensate’ –

Marie Sallois, sustainable development director of the IOC, told AFP the environment has become “a strategic subject” for the organisation since 2015 — 20 years after it was adopted in the charter.

Sallois says the IOC is “attentive to all air transport initiatives on the development of low-carbon solutions” and rejects the idea that the Olympic infrastructures are left to rot once the circus leaves town. 

She says “more than 75 percent of existing sites are still in use” of 900 sites from 21st century Games. 

For Lehenaff, it is all about “assess, reduce and compensate”. 

The ideal is to “reduce the number of infrastructures, their size, increase the compactness of the sites,” he says, adding there is also a need to “reduce the number of competitions”. 

He believes the 2024 Paris Olympics organisers are on the right path by promising to halve the CO2 the event produces to 1.5 million tonnes.

Perhaps the organisers will simply attempt to assuage their inability to meet their goal by following in UEFA’s footsteps. It promised to plant 50,000 trees to compensate for spreading this year’s European Championship across 12 countries. 

“Awareness is not the same in all countries, in all federations, in all sports,” Lachaze acknowledged.

From ageing electric batteries to old engines to rearview mirrors, the auto industry is revving up its recycling efforts as it faces pressure to reduce its colossal carbon footprint.

The world’s automakers are investing in facilities to salvage old parts but the industry is also looking to recycle the millions of electric batteries used for the cars of the future.

While electric cars are cleaner than their fossil fuel forebears, the raw materials needed for their batteries are extracted from mines in Africa that are often accused of environmental damage and using child labour.

“As demand for these materials increase, the pressures on these (economically marginalised) regions are likely to be amplified, risking the goals of a socially and ecologically sustainable renewable energy system,” according to the Institute for Sustainable Futures at University of Technology Sydney.

How the auto industry will manage its electric transition is likely to be among the hot topics at the two-week COP26 climate summit hosted by Britain starting October 31.

The sector produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire European Union, with 20 percent of it coming from manufacturing, according to the World Economic Forum.

Batteries can account for as much as half the price of electric cars, with a life expectancy ranging between eight and 15 years.

Recycling them could have a considerable impact.

It could reduce demand for lithium by 25 percent, cobalt by 35 percent, and nickel and copper by 55 percent in 2040, the Institute for Sustainable Futures said in a report in April.

But new mining projects are under way, with “the potential for adverse impacts on local environments and communities, including pollution of soil, air and water, human rights abuses and unsafe working conditions,” the Australian institute said.

It is technologically possible to recover over 90 percent of the metals used in batteries, but the effort is “limited by the lack of a strong economic driver or policy that could encourage the use of recycled materials,” the report said.

The European Commission wants to require that 12 percent of the cobalt, four percent of lithium and four percent of nickel used in electric batteries be from recycled material from 2030.

– Leading a ‘Revolt’ –

China is ahead of the game, according to experts, with battery maker CATL recently announcing the construction of a 32-billion-yuan ($5 billion, 4.3-billion-euro) recycling plant in Hubei province.

Redwood, headed by one of the founders of US electric car champion Tesla, raised $500 million in July to expand its recycling facility. 

Swedish startup Northvolt — a Volkswagen and BMW partner — plans to launch next year a factory capable of recycling 25,000 tonnes of batteries per year.

The company has pledged that 50 percent of its battery components would be made from recycled materials by 2030.

The project, dubbed Revolt, is part of the company’s promise to be the greenest battery maker in Europe.

Northvolt’s chief environmental officer, Emma Nehrenheim, warned that all market forecasts have underestimated the growth of battery production.

“Production is constantly growing,” Nehrenheim said.

“I’m more worried about the fact that Europe won’t be ready. I see lots of interest, but there could be some gaps. Readiness is needed. We have to act now,” she said.

French nuclear giant Orano is launching a project to apply techniques used for extracting uranium to recycle batteries.

French waste management company Veolia has a pilot project at a plant in eastern France that recycles smartphone and computer batteries.

At the plant, batteries are stripped of their plastic covering and the aluminium foils that hold the cells, which are then shredded to dust to extract the different metals.

– Recycling dashboards –

It is not just electric batteries that are being recycled as the industry aims to one day produce “circular cars” — vehicles with a net-zero carbon footprint.

In France, a joint venture of automaker Renault and utilities group Suez dismantles 5,000 cars per year for their parts.

The company, Indra, has taken its industrial process to Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland.

Workers empty fuel tanks and strips a car of its engine, tires, dashboard, rearview mirrors, and other parts within two hours — around 35 percent of the weight of the vehicle.

Each car can fetch up to 400 euros in salvaged parts which are sold to repair shops or private consumers. The rest is pressed, melted, burned or recycled for other sectors.

Jaguar Land Rover has a project to recycle aluminium from scrapped vehicles, which the company says could cut CO2 emissions from production by 26 percent.

The aviation sector is facing a great dilemma: How can it fulfil its ambition of doubling passenger numbers while meeting its goal of reducing its massive greenhouse gas emissions?

Slashing pollution from the industry is among the major challenges facing the world as leaders meet later this month for a key climate summit in Britain.

– How bad is it? –

Airlines transported 4.5 billion passengers in 2019, belching out in the process 900 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to two percent of total global emissions.

Passenger numbers are projected to double by 2050, meaning a parallel doubling of CO2 if no action is taken.

While the sector has sought to increase carbon efficiency, it has increasingly faced pressure from environmentalists and social movements such as “Flygskam” (“flight shame”), which appeared in Sweden in 2018.

Between 2009 and 2019, carriers improved their energy efficiency by 21.4 percent, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). But that was not enough to prevent the sector’s emissions from rising.

– What are the pledges? –

The IATA committed itself earlier this month to zero net emissions of CO2 by 2050, after having previously targeted a cut of just 50 percent. 

A group representing European airlines, airports and aerospace companies has made a similar commitment.

At state level, the European Union hopes to cut emissions by 55 percent compared with 1990 levels by 2030, aviation included.

The United States intends to slash the sector’s emissions share by a fifth by the end of this decade.

– What’s the flight plan? – 

The European group of airlines, airports and aerospace companies hopes half the emissions targets can be met with more fuel-efficient engines, the emergence of hydrogen and electric propulsion, and a better management of air traffic.

But the IATA says such measures would contribute to just 14 percent of the effort.

Plans to reach the net zero target also rely on carbon offsetting schemes, such as planting trees, which NGOs say do not address the problem.

– Role of sustainable fuel – 

“If there’s a ‘silver bullet’ to decarbonising aviation, it’s sustainable aviation fuels (SAF),” says Brian Moran, Boeing’s vice-president of sustainability public policy.

The IATA hopes to accomplish two-thirds of its emissions reductions by using SAFs — non-conventional fuels derived from organic products including cooking oil and algae.

The European Commission will require that SAFs account for at least two percent of aviation kerosene by 2025, rising to five percent by 2030 and 63 percent by 2050.

Aviation giants Boeing and Airbus say their planes will be burning 100 percent SAFs by the end of this decade.

SAFs, which is four times more expensive than kerosene, accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the fuel used in aviation in 2019.

The United States is proposing a tax credit to encourage SAF use while the EU wants to put a new levy on kerosene for flights within the 27-nation bloc.

– Is it doable? –

Biomass fuels are a limited resource.

“We have estimated that by 2050, advanced biofuel from residue (will) allow for covering (just) 11 percent of aviation’s needs,” says Jo Dardenne of the European NGO federation Transport et Environnement (T&E).

The aviation sector is also betting on synthetic fuels, or e-fuels, made with hydrogen produced from renewable sources of energy and with CO2 captured from the atmosphere.

E-fuels are supposed to be the main type of SAF in the future.

But Timur Gul, head of energy technology policy at the International Energy Agency, says replacing just 10 percent of oil-based jet fuel with e-fuels would require the equivalent of electricity production from Spain and France combined.

Dardenne says the technologies being considered to reduce emissions require a lot of energy. What is needed, he says, is to “reduce demand” — meaning to fly less.

The burning question going into the Glasgow climate summit is whether major economies can, by 2050, reduce emissions enough to deliver a carbon neutral world in which humanity no longer adds planet-warming gases to the atmosphere. 

Less talked about — but rising quickly on the climate agenda — are tools and techniques to pull CO2 straight out of the air.

Even scientists sceptical about its feasibility agree that without carbon dioxide removal (CDR) — aka “negative emission” — it will be very difficult to meet the Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming below two degrees Celsius.

“We need drastic, radical emissions reductions, and on top of that we need some CDR,” said Glen Peters, research director at the Centre for International Climate Research. 

– What is CO2 removal? –

There are basically two ways to extract CO2 from thin air.  

One is to boost nature’s capacity to absorb and stockpile carbon. Healing degraded forests, restoring mangroves, industrial-scale tree planting, boosting carbon uptake in rocks or the ocean — all fall under the hotly debated category of “nature-based solutions”.

The second way — called direct air capture — uses chemical processes to strip out CO2, then recycles it for industrial use or locks it away in porous rock formations, unused coal beds or saline aquifers.   

A variation known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, combines elements from both approaches. 

Wood pellets or other biomass is converted into biofuels or burned to drive turbines that generate electricity. The CO2 emitted is roughly cancelled out by the CO2 absorbed during plant growth.

But when carbon dioxide in the power plant’s exhaust is syphoned off and stored underground, the process becomes a net-negative technology.

– Do we really need it? –

Yes, for a couple of reasons.

Even if the world begins drawing down carbon pollution by three, four or five percent each year — and that is a very big if — some sectors like cement and steel production, long-haul aviation and agriculture are expected to maintain emission levels for decades. 

“We have modelling, but no one is sure what we might need in 2050,” said Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and an expert on CDR. 

“There will be residual emissions and the numbers might be high.”

And there is another reason. 

The August report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes it alarmingly clear that the 1.5C threshold will be breached in the coming decades no matter how aggressively greenhouse gases are drawn down. 

CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, which means that the only way to bring Earth’s average surface temperature back under the wire by 2100 is to suck some of it out of the air.  

– What’s hot, what’s not? –

BECCS was pencilled into IPCC climate models more than a decade ago as the theoretically cheapest form of negative emissions, but has barely developed since.

“I don’t see a BECCS boom,” said Geden.

A peer-reviewed proposal in 2019 to draw down excess CO2 by planting a trillion trees sparked huge excitement in the media and among gas and oil companies that have made afforestation offsets a central pillar of their attempts to align with Paris treaty goals.

But the idea was sharply criticised by experts, who pointed out that it would require converting twice the area of India into mono-culture tree farms.    

Also, planting trees to soak up CO2 is fine — until the forests burn down in climate-enhanced wildfires.

“They really have a problem in California,” Geden said. “The state deals with forest offsets and emissions trading, but their forests are burning down.”

Among all the carbon dioxide removal methods, direct air capture is among the least developed but the most talked about. 

“It’s such a sexy technology,” said Peters. “Part of that is marketing — glossy brochures, a fancy technology, shiny silver. It captures the imagination.”

– How fast can we scale up? –

Direct air capture (DAC) is a large-scale industrial process that requires huge amounts of energy to run.

Existing technology is also a long way from making a dent in the problem.

For example, the amount of CO2 extracted in a year by the world’s largest direct air capture plant (4,000 tons) — opened last month in Iceland by Climeworks — is equivalent to three seconds’ worth of current global emissions (40 billion tons).

Earlier this year a team of researchers led by David Victor at the University of California San Diego’s Deep Decarbonisation Initiative wanted to see how much a “wartime-like crash deployment” of DAC could lower CO2 concentrations under different emissions scenarios.

Assuming investment of a trillion dollars a year starting now, DAC knocked off some two billion tonnes of CO2 annually from global emissions by 2050 in the models. 

But only when coupled with the most ambitious carbon-cutting scenario laid out by the IPCC was that enough to bring temperatures back down — after rising to 2C — to around 1.7C by 2100.

– Corporate investment? – 

Direct Air Capture has benefited from a wave of corporate backing.

In April, Tesla CEO Elon Musk launched the $100-million X-Prize for CO2 removal technology.

Last month, Breakthrough Energy founder Bill Gates unveiled a corporate partnership — American Airlines, ArcelorMittal, Bank of America, Microsoft, The BlackRock Foundation and General Motors — to turbocharge the development of direct air capture, sustainable aviation fuel and two other new energy technologies.

“A global carbon removal industry is coming,” Johanna Forster and Naomi Vaughan, both from the University of East Anglia, noted last week in a commentary.  

The danger, said Peters, is that some companies may talk up future carbon dioxide removal rather than reducing emissions today.  

– Impact on UN negotiations? –

Appeals to remove the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere have begun to enter the political arena, and could become a contentious issue at the UN negotiations in Glasgow and beyond, experts say.

First India, then China, called earlier this year on rich countries to go beyond 2050 net-zero commitments. 

“Countries from the Global South are demanding that industrialised countries go net-negative,” said Geden.

Small island states whose nations are literally slipping under the waves “are dead serious about carbon dioxide removal already,” he added. 

Tired of seeing the lush Amazon destroyed over many years, Brazilian street artist Mundano decided to let nature speak for itself: he painted a giant mural in Sao Paolo using ashes he collected from the scorched rainforest to raise awareness of climate change.

The giant 1,000-square meter fresco titled “The Forest Firefighter” — featuring a heroic figure who is helpless in the face of a raging fire — will be inaugurated on Tuesday.

“The idea came from impotence. We’ve been seeing for decades how the jungle has been burnt, and in the last few years that has reached record levels,” Mundano, who goes by one name and calls himself an ‘artivist,’ told AFP.

Mundano, 36, collected 200 kilograms of ashes from different areas affected by fires to create the mural on a building close to Avenida Paulista, the main avenue running through Brazil’s largest city. 

The ashes came from the Amazon jungle, the Pantanal wetlands, the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado savannah.

– Bringing ‘ashes to the people’ –

Mundano hopes his mural will raise awareness among Sao Paulo residents about the vast fires that ravage Brazil’s precious ecosphere every year.

“No one sees the fires, they’re very far away in the Amazon. The idea is to bring the ashes here to the people to create greater empathy,” said Mundano.

In June and July, Mundano felt the heat of the fires firsthand when he went to collect the ashes.

But what also caught his attention was the distress of the firefighters trying to extinguish the flames that do so much damage to Brazil’s flora and fauna.

Symbolizing the fauna in the mural is a crocodile skeleton painted next to the heroic firefighter.

The entire fresco is made in various shades of black and grey depending on how much water Mundano mixed in with the ashes.

The black and white artwork contrasts sharply with the colorful graffiti that adorns many buildings in Sao Paulo.

“We live in a city that is grey, or asphalt and grey. The pavement is grey, there’s pollution … and we’re becoming grey too.”

– ‘Negligent’ –

A graffiti artist during his teenage years, Mundano made a name for himself in 2012 by decorating the carts of the city’s recyclable materials collectors with bright colors and signs that read “My vehicle doesn’t pollute.”

In 2020, Mundano painted another giant mural using toxic mud from the Brumadinho dam that collapsed in 2019 leaving 270 people dead.

His current mural is a statement denouncing Brazil’s successive governments that Mundano calls “negligent” and incapable of protecting the environment.

Things only got worse under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

Since he took office in 2019, an average of 10,000 square kilometers of Amazon forest has been destroyed per year, compared to 6,500 km2 over the previous decade.

The fires that follow deforestation to prepare the land for agriculture and livestock farming, have also reached alarming levels.

“The current government is promoting the dismantling of the environment and trampling on the basic rights of vulnerable populations” such as indigenous people, said Mundano.

His mural is based on a famous painting by Brazilian artist Candido Portinari titled “The Coffee Farmer.”

Like the 1934 painting, Mundano’s fresco shows a Black man with his face turned to the side and vegetation in the background.

Mundano used a real person to model for his painting, a volunteer fire fighter named Vinicius Curva de Vento, whom the artist saw battle the flames. 

But while Portinari’s farmer wields a spade to dig the ground, the forest firefighter uses his shovel to smother the flames.

And the luxurious vegetation in Portinari’s painting contrasts with the mural’s scorched landscape that includes trucks piled high with felled tree trunks.

Commonly known as “forever chemicals,” PFAs can be found in water, air, food, packaging or even in shampoo or makeup, but on Monday the United States unveiled plans to tackle these ubiquitous and potentially harmful substances.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a three-year plan aimed at setting maximum thresholds in drinking water for the chemicals, technically called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. 

There are several thousand types of PFAS, but their common characteristics is that they disintegrate extremely slowly, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.”

Once ingested, they accumulate in the body. According to some studies, exposure to PFAS can lead to problems with fertility, developmental delays in children, increased risks of obesity or certain cancers (prostate, kidney and testicular), an increase in cholesterol levels or even a decrease in the immune response to certain infections or after a vaccine. 

The EPA plans to designate certain PFAS as “hazardous substances” and will demand that manufacturers who produce them provide information on their toxicity.

“For far too long, families across America – especially those in underserved communities – have suffered from PFAS in their water, their air, or in the land their children play on,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. 

“This comprehensive, national PFAS strategy will deliver protections to people who are hurting, by advancing bold and concrete actions that address the full lifecycle of these chemicals.”

The roadmap takes a three-pronged approach: increase research on PFAS, act to limit their dissemination in the environment and accelerate the clean-up of contaminated sites.

“Thousands of communities have already detected these toxic forever chemicals in their water and PFAS have been confirmed at nearly 400 military installations,” said the Environmental Working Group, which estimated that “more than 200 million Americans are drinking water contaminated with PFAS.”

While welcoming the new measures, the EWG lamented the fact that they come after decades of delays.

“The EPA has known of the risks posed by PFAS since at least 1998 but failed to act,” it said in a statement.

PFAS can notably be found in food packaging, such as pizza boxes, but also in certain cleaning products, paints, varnishes or coatings, according to the EPA.

They can also be found in fish from contaminated water, or in dairy products, due to the exposure of livestock to these products on certain sites.

A veteran gorilla descended from a celebrated forebear immortalised on a banknote has been found dead near a national park in the Demoratic Republic of Congo, the protected reserve announced on Monday.

“The solitary gorilla Mugaruka, aged about 35, died of bloody diarrhoea” on Friday, park spokesman Hubert Mulongoy told AFP.

The body was discovered by rangers in a tea plantation close to Kahuzi-Biega.

The gorilla was the last descendant of Maheshe who was killed by poachers and remembered on a banknote under Mobutu Sese Seko’s presidency.

“It’s an enormous loss,” Mulongoy said.

“He would come regularly to visit us in the general area of the park, to the public’s delight.”

Mugaruka lived alone having lost an arm in a trap at the age of three.

The 600,000 square kilometre (2,300 sq mile) reserve, lies between two extinct volcanoes near Bukavu, in one of the most troubled areas of the vast country.

Kahuzi-Biega provides a habitat for one of the last populations of eastern lowland gorillas, made up of about 250 primates, according to its website.

In August, the park — close to the Rwanda border — celebrated the birth of an eastern lowland gorilla.

It is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in danger because of the presence of armed groups and settlers, poaching and deforestation.str-bmb/bp/pbr