The five-day United Nations Environmental Assembly meeting began yesterday in Nairobi, Kenya. The theme of the assembly is "Innovative solutions for environmental challenges and sustainable consumption and production (1)," with the goal being to have individual countries "significantly" reduce plastics production, including a phasing out of single-use plastic by 2030 (2,3). The night before the summit, an estimate of $20 trillion was declared as the cost of ecosystem loss due to pollution (4). What also happened the night before the meeting was the crash of flight ET302 in Ethiopia, killing 21 UN workers, many heading to the environmental assembly. While trying to find if any microplastics scientists I know died in the crash, I learned that media outlets are not giving out this information clearly. CNN (5) barely mentions the environmental meeting, and the article even goes further to say they don't know why the 21 UN workers were on the plane...
Without taking too much of a turn towards the conspiracies and tin hats, let's still recognize that people who work for the greater good can become targets. So, I'll end with a fun fact: in 2016 alone the sales of bottled water (a single-use item) made $16 billion dollars in the U.S. (6).
1)http://web.unep.org/environmentassembly/un-environment-assembly-and-governing-council
2)https://www.monitor.co.ug/News/World/Plastic-crosshairs-UN-environment-forum/688340-5019926swbbi6z/index.html
3) https://www.afp.com/en/news/826/plastic-crosshairs-un-environment-forum-doc-1eh38t3
4)https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/science/687615/plastic-use-in-crosshairs-at-un-environment-forum/story/
5) https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/africa/ethiopian-airlines-crash-victims/index.html
6) https://www.bottledwater.org/economics/bottled-water-market
Without taking too much of a turn towards the conspiracies and tin hats, let's still recognize that people who work for the greater good can become targets. So, I'll end with a fun fact: in 2016 alone the sales of bottled water (a single-use item) made $16 billion dollars in the U.S. (6).
1)http://web.unep.org/environmentassembly/un-environment-assembly-and-governing-council
2)https://www.monitor.co.ug/News/World/Plastic-crosshairs-UN-environment-forum/688340-5019926swbbi6z/index.html
3) https://www.afp.com/en/news/826/plastic-crosshairs-un-environment-forum-doc-1eh38t3
4)https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/scitech/science/687615/plastic-use-in-crosshairs-at-un-environment-forum/story/
5) https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/10/africa/ethiopian-airlines-crash-victims/index.html
6) https://www.bottledwater.org/economics/bottled-water-market
RSS Feed