arizona state university

The Costs Of Mislabeled Seafood | Earth Wise

January 27, 2021 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Seafood is the world’s most highly traded food commodity and reports of seafood mislabeling have become increasingly common over time. A new study by Arizona State University looked at the environmental effects of mislabeled seafood.

What is mislabeled seafood? Sometimes the snapper you were served was really Pacific Ocean Perch. Maybe grouper was really whitefin weakfish. Many times white leg shrimp are actually giant tiger prawns.

Approximately 190,000 to 250,000 tons of mislabeled seafood are sold in the U.S. each year, or 3.4 to 4.3% of consumed seafood. Previous studies focused on the economic aspects of getting cheaper fish when paying for more expensive fish. The new research looks at the environmental costs associated with mislabeled seafood.

Substituted seafood is 28% more likely to be imported from other countries, which may have weaker environmental laws than the U.S. In the United States, fishery management is pretty good. There is strong monitoring and enforcement to support limits on fishing. Metrics like fish abundance, fishing mortality, bycatch, and discards are all monitored. In many other places, this is not the case.

To really evaluate the overall effects of seafood mislabeling, one has to take into account both the rates of substitution and the levels of consumption.

Consuming fish from a well-managed fishery should not have a negative impact in terms of the population now or in the future. But even inadvertently consuming fish from poorly managed fisheries in not sustainable. It is good to get your seafood from a trusted source.

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ASU Study Looks At The Environmental Effects Of Purchasing, Consuming Mislabeled Fish

Photo, posted August 1, 2014, courtesy of Ralph Daily via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Urban Agriculture And Sustainability Goals

November 12, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In 2016, the City Council of Phoenix, Arizona adopted eight Environmental Sustainability goals for 2050 that lay out the desired long term requirements in order to become a Sustainable Desert City. Recently, a group of researchers from Arizona State University assessed how urban agriculture can help Phoenix, a desert city of 1.6 million people, meet those sustainability goals.

Using public records and high-resolution satellite imagery, researchers analyzed the potential benefits of growing crops in three types of urban areas in Phoenix: vacant lots, rooftops, and building facades. The study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and the USDA, estimated that there are 28 square miles (or 5.4% of city space) available for urban agriculture. The data-driven analysis found that 71% of the available areas for urban agriculture would come from existing buildings as opposed to vacant lots.

All this available space for urban agriculture in Phoenix could supply the city with nearly 183,000 tons of fresh produce annually, which would allow for the delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables to all of the city’s existing food deserts. In fact, the city’s own urban-agriculture output could meet 90% of the fresh produce demand that currently exists in Phoenix.

In addition to producing food, rooftop agriculture could also reduce the energy use in buildings by 3% per building per year, and displace more than 55,000 tons of CO2 annually. The use of vacant lots could increase the total Phoenix green space by 17%, and reduce the number of areas lacking green space by 60%.

This study demonstrates the many different ways that urban agriculture can benefit a city.

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Urban agriculture can push the sustainability

Photo, posted May 10, 2011, courtesy of Stephen Zank via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Heat And Plastic Bottles

August 21, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In the middle of July, Americans along the East Coast and in the Midwest suffered through a massive heat wave that saw actual temperatures soaring and so-called feels-like temperatures go much higher. The punishing heat had many of us reaching for those plastic water bottles all day long as we tried to keep hydrated.

Studies have shown that those single-use plastic bottles do not handle the heat very well. Most plastic items release tiny amounts of chemicals into the beverages or food that they contain. But the hotter it gets, the more the substances in plastic can move into food or drinking water. As temperature and time increase, the chemical bonds in plastics increasingly break down and chemicals are more likely to leach.

A study at Arizona State University in 2008 looked at how heat sped up the release of the element antimony in bottles made of the common plastic PET. Antimony is used to manufacture the plastic and can be toxic in high doses. At mild temperatures, very little antimony is released. But PET and other plastics can leach a variety of chemicals when exposed to higher temperatures.

According to the FDA, the amounts of chemicals released by plastics are too miniscule to cause health problems. However, scientists are still looking at the long-term effects of using so much plastic. The question is whether all those small doses can eventually add up to something not so harmless. Given that we don’t really know the cumulative effect of being surrounded by plastics in the goods we buy as well as the presence of microplastics in our water, it seems like a good idea to try to limit our exposure when alternatives are available.

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Exposed to extreme heat, plastic bottles may ultimately become unsafe

Photo, posted June 7, 2013, courtesy of Tim Stahmer via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Water From Desert Air

May 7, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Last spring, we talked about a solar-powered water harvester designed to pull water out of even dry desert air. The prototype device was described in a paper by scientists at UC Berkeley and MIT in the journal Science.