If practices and public policies do not change, the mass of mismanaged plastic waste in the world will double to 121 million tonnes per year by 2050, according to a study published in Science. The article also assesses the potential impact of global measures, such as those envisaged by the forthcoming UN global treaty on plastic pollution, which begins its final negotiating session at the end of this month.
The development of generative artificial intelligence, and in particular of large language models, could generate between 1.2 and 5 million tonnes of accumulated electronic waste between 2020 and 2030, according to a study published in Nature Computational Science. The study estimates the mass of waste generated by hardware elements such as processing units, storage units and power supply systems.
Current carbon capture technologies to mitigate climate change only work well when applied to concentrated sources, such as power plant exhaust gases. An international team of researchers has developed a new method using a special porous material capable of capturing CO2 directly from the air, despite its low concentration. According to the authors, who publish their results in the journal Nature, this technology ‘represents a significant step towards clean air’.
The number of people who suffer a stroke, die from it or live with a subsequent disability has risen sharply worldwide between 1990 and 2021, according to a study published in The Lancet Neurology. The contribution of high temperatures to ill health and premature death from stroke has increased by 72% since 1990. For the first time, the study reveals the high contribution (on par with smoking) of particulate air pollution to subarachnoid haemorrhage (fatal brain haemorrhage).
A new web-based tool analyzes major cities like Tokyo, Paris, Atlanta or Barcelona to see how close they are to the 15-minute city concept, where residents take less than those minutes to access essential services by foot, bike, or public transport. According to the study, published in Nature Cities, few cities fit this concept. The tool, which is freely accessible and uses data from 10,000 cities sourced from the open-source packages GeoPandas and OpenStreetMap, could be useful for developing action plans and estimating how viable it is to transform certain cities to follow this model.
More than 52 million tonnes of plastic waste are emitted around the world every year, according to a study published in Nature that inventories plastic pollution in 50,702 cities. It concludes that littering is the largest source of plastic emissions in the global North, and uncollected waste is the largest source in the South.
A team led by the Carlos III Health Institute has analyzed how short-term concentrations of particles associated with wildfires and Saharan dust incursions influence hospital admissions in Spain due to mental and behavioral disorders. The results were explained in a briefing organized by the Science Media Centre Spain.
Wildfires increase the level of tropospheric ozone. An international study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health and involving Spanish participation, suggests that one- to three-day exposure to wildfire-related ozone pollution is linked to increased daily all-cause and respiratory mortality rates. The study analysed more than 700 locations - including in Spain - between 2000 and 2016, calculated the daily concentration of wildfire-related ozone pollution and compared it with data on daily deaths in the areas studied.
Nitrous oxide is considered one of the three most important greenhouse gases, behind carbon dioxide and methane. According to a report by the Global Carbon Project, emissions of this gas from human activities continue to grow, with a 40% increase over the last four decades - from 2020 to 1980. The research, led by Boston College and published in the journal Earth System Science Data, reveals that in the last decade, agricultural production through the use of nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure contributed 74% of total anthropogenic emissions of this gas.
Research with Spanish participation concludes that, in European countries, tropospheric ozone pollution from beyond national borders was associated with 88% of ozone-attributable deaths, and only 12% were due to domestic sources. The authors, whose research is published in Nature Medicine, used epidemiological and air quality modelling to quantify the burden of mortality in Europe associated with ozone pollution from various geographical sources. This included more than six million deaths in 813 regions in 35 European countries - including Spain - in the 2015-2017 warm seasons.