Dubai is a fairytale world. Back in 1995 a jeep brought me to a region where you do not want to run out of fuel: Rub’ al Khali or the Empty Quarter. Think of Lawrence of Arabia and a thirsty death. This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, a sandpit as big as France.

Today, Dubai has a mile-long artificial peninsula in the form of a palm tree that is packed with hotels and expensive villas. When the global recession hit Dubai in 2009, the world stood still. Well, at least the work on Dubai’s artificial island project called “The World” stopped. By that time, it had already moved a massive 321 million tons of sand, but the islands were left empty.

Elsewhere, the building boom went on. The Burj Khalifa is now the highest tower in the world. According to its website, there are about 330,000 cubic meters of cement in the tower – one fourth of it comprises sand. How easy for the Burj and other Dubai skyscrapers to have all that sand in their backyard, right?

As it turns out, the tons of sand in the Burj Khalifa came from Australia because there is not enough sand for concrete available in that region itself. The largest continuous sand desert in the world is unusable for concrete. It is not even good enough to build those islands. The wind has free play in the desert and makes the sand grains too round, so that they do not stick together.

Marine sand is better but the lion’s share of the marine sand on the coast of Dubai has already been used up for the palm islands. And the salt in sea sand does not work well with the steel in reinforced concrete. Dubai desalinates its water but that is way too costly a method to use to clean marine sand. It also requires oil, and unfortunately for Dubai, its oil stock is dwindling. The city already imports more petroleum products than it exports and in a decade or two the wells will be dry.

The World Expo in 2020, to be held in Dubai, will probably be one of the world’s most pompous of shows. A tower even higher tower than the Burj Khalifa is being built for it.

In 2012, the British business bank Barclays amended the popular adage that “pride comes before a fall” with a study that shows that “high-rises come before a fall” – demonstrating that there is a strong chance of financial crashes following a boom in the construction of skyscrapers. If you look past the palaces in Dubai and its sinking oil, water and construction sand reserves, then the question is not whether but when the desert will blast Dubai’s bling into decor more suitable for an apocalyptic film.

Singapore: stockpiling sand

Nearly 6,000 km to the South East of Dubai is Singapore, which stockpiles sand. It imports massive amounts of this resource and keeps it as a reserve, comparable to a strategic stock of oil. Singapore needs sand to continue to grow – the city-state has increased its land mass by 22% in the past 50 years.

Initially, this was easy. Its neighbours sold it their sand. But in 1997, Malaysia officially stopped selling sand to Singapore. Indonesia and Cambodia stopped in 2007, and Vietnam in 2009. The entire international sand business became a political mine field. Populations tend to dislike the idea of selling pieces of their country for the purpose of expanding another country, especially if violence against them and their environment is involved.

In some cases, the export went underground. The non-governmental organisation Global Witness found that in Cambodia – the most corrupt country in South East Asia according to anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International – contracts worth millions were still ongoing, with officials involved. In practice, companies dig sand in vulnerable natural areas and local fishermen lose their key capital: fish. Investigative reporting has shown that this happened in Vietnam, also as a result of the illegal export of sand to Singapore.

The sand mafia also swept 24 Indonesian islands off the map to sell the sand in Singapore. This caused a dispute over the exact location of the international border between Singapore and Indonesia. At one point, Singapore had to pay $190 per tonne of sand, making it more expensive than a barrel of crude oil. Singapore’s sand story has occasionally made it to the news, but today it becomes ever more obvious that the scarcity of sand across the world is spreading and affecting all of us. The growing sand shortage is putting sand in the machine called “the industrialised civilisation”. The shortage is already leading to deadly conflicts in some areas of the world.

The sand mafia in India

Sumaira Abdulali, 55, is now a public figure in India. The media call her the ‘Minister of Noise’ because of her activism against noise pollution in Mumbai. But she first became famous for her fight against the sand mafia. In 2004, she noticed that the beach near her house in Alibaug, near Mumbai, was shrinking. She heard trucks at night that she suspected were carting the sand away, and decided to take action. She called the police, took her car and drove to where the road ended at the beach.

“Instead of rushing to the scene of the crime, the police warned [off] the illegal sand miners”, said Abdulali. As she waited in her car for the police to arrive, the men present at the mining site pulled her out and assaulted her. She survived the beatings, but needed to be hospitalised. As she was beaten, one of the miners asked: “Do you know who I am?” He was the son of a local politician, also the owner of a construction company.

Two years later, Abdulali started a lawsuit against the sand mafia in Maharashtra. In 2010, the Bombay High Court banned sand mining: first only in areas that came under the ecologically-sensitive Coastal Regulation Zone and later in the entire state of Maharashtra, whose capital, Mumbai, is the base of the Hindi film industry, popularly known as Bollywood. With more than 20 million inhabitants, Mumbai is also one of the 10 largest cities in the world – with a huge appetite for sand by its construction industry. Despite that, the ban on sand mining remained in force until protective measures were turned into laws, which did not happen until 2015.

Abdulali sums up the effects of sand extraction in India: soil erosion, landslides, water table loss, infertility of farmland, disturbances of ecosystems and marine life, beach disappearances – all the way to collapsing bridges.

Once Abdulali made a surreal video of a train crossing the Vaitarna railway bridge while machines were extracting sand from the riverbed. That bridge is in Virar, north of Mumbai, and the city’s sole link to North India. Last August, when the Mahad bridge, across the Savitri river, on the Mumbai-Goa highway collapsed, killing at least 28 people, several activists including Abdulali blamed the incident on sand mining on the riverbed. Around that time, railway officials also admitted that they were concerned that the Vaitarna bridge’s foundation had been weakened by illegal sand mining on the riverbed. A senior Western Railways officer told The Hindu newspaper: “We believe there is a nexus between the sand mafia and certain state government departments. Due to the illegal sand mining, the flow of the Vaitarna has been altered, which is a dangerous sign for the bridge’s health.”

In 2010, Abdulali took a journalist and photographer on a field visit to Raigad – the Maharashtra district where the Mahad bridge is located – where sand extraction was in progress despite the ban. They pretended to be looking to buy land, but then filmed illegal and industrial exploitation of sand. Their return to Mumbai did not go well. Their car was attacked and they were forced into a car chase on a dirt track, with two cars trying to push them into a ravine. Abdulali said that on the main road, a truck was also waiting to crash into them, but it also missed. “What saved our lives is that my husband is a professional rally driver and he taught me some of his driving skills,” said Abdulali. “Again, the police were in cahoots the mafia. I wanted to report an attempted murder attack, but they wanted to give me a speeding ticket! Once again, a powerful local politician controlled the illegal trade in sand.”

The Bombay High court later severely criticised the police for the attack on Abdulali and her companions. Abdulali’s story is unfortunately not an isolated case. In India, anti-sand mining activists are often physically attacked and even killed.

Earlier this year, journalist Sandhya Ravishankar, who wrote a four-part series on illegal sand mining along Tamil Nadu’s southern beaches, which was published in the online magazine The Wire, said that she had been receiving death threats and was facing online abuse, which she blamed on a sand-mining company that she had named in her reports. She filed a complaint in connection with the threats and harassment with the Chennai police in March.

Abdulali says that the people in control of the business usually make sure that they also get into the local village council, or at even higher political levels. For instance, the father of one of the men who beat her up in 2004 became a minister of state in Maharashtra. He claims he is out of the sand business now, but still owns the largest sand storage site. He has shifted his business interests to the next goldmine: stones.

Abdulali said that recycling construction material would help reduce the demand for new sand. “To reduce the demand for new sand, you need to evolve into a circular economy,” she said. “Big cities in India crush many old buildings to make room for new, but the debris ends up at landfills. In some countries, the use of primary material is only allowed after the demolition waste is used up.

“In the Netherlands, 90% of all demolition waste is recycled. Even poorer countries like Vietnam are now reusing demolition waste. You can build roads with a lot less sand, by recycling plastic as a resource. We have to do that. If we continue like this, India will dig a grave for itself and pay a very expensive price. The circular economy is a much better option.”

Today you can also drink beer for the sake of beaches. A machine reduces empty beer bottles to a kind of sand that is useful in construction. But a circular economy also needs energy. The beer campaigners do have a point: beaches worldwide are in trouble. Rivers transport sand to the sea. Take the sand out and you end up without a beach. In Sri Lanka, they found that out the hard way.

The most eroded coastline in all of Sri Lanka is around the delta of the Maha Oya river, which, not by accident, is also the river with the most sand mining. In some places the beach recedes by 12 metres to 15 metres each year. Thousands of families here have lost their land by the sea. When the damage became too rampant and too evident, a ban on mechanical sand extraction in the river was called for. But here too, the sand mafia keeps digging.

The sand mafia is not limited to South Asia. In Elmina Bay in Ghana, the sand mafia even digs sand just in front of the few beach resorts the country has. Hotels have lost 30 metres of beach. The sea now comes to their doorstep. The Environmental Justice Atlas contains the details of at least 64 conflicts around sand, gravel and quarries. Even the most mined material in the world has become scarce. The resulting struggle for what is left is getting ugly. In the future, that could be a violent struggle in a big way.

The coming sand wars

Worldwide, we use twice as much sand as all the rivers in the world transport together. As a result, we have started digging elsewhere. The majority of all the sand we now use is marine sand. As a result, two thirds of all beaches in the world lose sand.

Northwest Europe fetches more than 100 million cubic meters of marine sediment from the North East Atlantic, mainly sand from the shallow North Sea. But marine sand is less suitable for concrete because salty sand does not go well with concrete reinforced with steel. To use marine sand in construction, you need to wash it with fresh water. Unfortunately for us, that is another problem.

Seventy percent of the earth is covered with water, but essentially only 0.007% of that is fresh water available for consumption. Fred Pearce, the acclaimed author of When the rivers run dry: Water, the defining crisis of the twenty first century, pointed out a while ago that if everyone today lived like the average meat, beer and milk consuming westerner, all the water in all the rivers in the whole world would not be enough. Forget the one or two litres of water you drink every day. Making one average ice cream uses up 1,000 litres of water, one steak takes 5,000 litres.

The world’s soils provide twice as much food today as they did a generation ago, but in that period we also diverted three times more water from rivers and the surface to agriculture. At one point, hard choices will need to be made between using fresh water for food crops or for washing marine sand. The interests of the construction industry and those of farmers will clash.

Another hard choice to be made is that between the beaches and our buildings. Oddly enough, in the US, despite a federal ban on sand mining on beaches, there is just one company openly digging away on a beach in California, using a legal loophole. The building company that is literally making America smaller has its headquarters in Mexico.

But that conflict is an anecdotal side-show compared to the one between the world’s two superpowers. The demand for sand increases annually by more than 5%, mainly due to rapid urbanisation. In 20 years, the production of cement – which requires sand – has tripled. China uses about half of all sand used globally and makes 58% of all the cement in the world. Shanghai built more skyscrapers in 10 years than New York ever did.

The Chinese hunger for sand is immense, and sand mines on the mainland are no longer low-hanging fruit. Poyang Lake, China’s largest lake, is also the largest sand mine in the world. Two hundred and thirty-six million cubic metres of sand are extracted from it every year. Because of this, the water table near the lake has dropped, hurting fauna and flora, and also the locals who live in the vicinity.

China today imports one billion tonnes of sand a year. That is five times more than its annual coal imports. In the South China Sea, China is busy pumping sand on pieces of rock that would otherwise stay under the water – thus creating islands. These islands strengthen its claim on the disputed South China Sea, securing shipping lanes, and access to new oil and gas reserves.

The tensions with other countries claiming parts of the same sea have increased in recent years, sometimes resulting in deaths – as was the case in a conflict between China and Vietnam.

But the bigger issue is the rising tension between China and the US. The Trump administration does not appear very willing to accommodate China as a rising superpower. Trump’s strategist and right-hand man Steve Bannon once said that the US and China will be at war within five to 10 years, and that such a war would begin in the South China Sea. Trump’s Foreign Minister Rex Tillerson, formerly the CEO of oil giant Exxon, claimed that China should not be allowed access to the islands it is building in that sea. This prompted China to remind Washington that the US was not a party to the conflict in the South China Sea and it would be wise to keep it that way.

Since World War II, the US has been the dominant navy in Asia and in the South China Sea. However, China’s construction of islands in the South China Sea is accompanied by an expansion of its military presence in the area. Although most media attention regarding those troubled waters is related to potential oil sources and the strategic importance of the disputed islands to China, The Economist wrote in February 2015 that there is another reason why China is so eager to control that sea: sand.

Sand Wars was the title of a popular 2013 documentary by the European channel ARTE. It prompted the United Nations to draft a report called Sand. Rarer than one thinks. It all makes this author think about one book from the 1930s. In that era of emerging fascism, in his book War with the Newts, the Nobel Prize-nominated author Karel Capek satirised the shortsightedness of appeasement, the slow erosion of norms and a raw capitalist expansion strategy that ended with the loss of our coastlines by the very same creature humans created. Little could he know that a century later, facts are trying to catch up with his science-fiction.

This Author

Nick Meynen is one of the Ecologist’s New Voices contributors. He works at the EnvJustice project in the European Environment Bureau but he is also a journalist and an author. The sand series is part of his new book the title of which translates to: Frontlines. A journey through the shadows of the world economy

A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.

The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).

On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.

The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.

He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”

In fact, organic and other gardeners have long been using vinegar as a weedkiller, which works by sucking moisture out of plants’ leaves. It’s most effective if used in dry weather when plants are already water-stressed, and the vinegar won’t get washed off or diluted by rain.

Most recipes also advise adding soap or washing up liquid to help it spread over leaves.

What’s Monsanto’s rationale here?

Why does Burtscher think that Scotts brought out this product? “The World Health Organisations’ cancer agency IARC has stated that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto has admitted in court that it cannot claim that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer because the complete formulation has never been tested.

“Garden centres are wondering what they can tell their customers. They have undoubtedly lost business. Some have phased out all chemical pesticides, such as Bellaflora, which took this step in cooperation with GLOBAL 2000 long before IARC came out with its verdict.”

Burtscher says that in the case of Bellaflora, the NGO didn’t need to apply much pressure: “The expertise came from the company. Now they only sell organic-approved plant protection products.”

But why does Burtscher think Scotts are calling its new vinegar-based herbicide Roundup? “Maybe Scotts thought: We need this trade name because people see Roundup as more effective than vinegar!”

Toxic adjuvants in the new Roundup? Or just soap?

Burtscher spent about €30 on the glyphosate-free Roundup but says in future he will just buy vinegar if it works out cheaper. It may also be safer, he adds, since “We do not know if the vinegar-based Roundup formulation still contains toxic adjuvants.”

(‘Adjuvants’ are additives present in glyphosate herbicide formulations that are designed to increase the toxicity of glyphosate to plants, for example by ‘fixing’ them to leaves and reduce wash-off in rain. But they can also increase the toxicity to animals, as in the case of tallowamine often used with glyphosate.)

But if Scotts can prove the safety of the adjuvants, Burtscher says it’s a win-win situation: “It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment.”

One thing is certain: glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.

The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).

On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.

The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.

He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”

In fact, organic and other gardeners have long been using vinegar as a weedkiller, which works by sucking moisture out of plants’ leaves. It’s most effective if used in dry weather when plants are already water-stressed, and the vinegar won’t get washed off or diluted by rain.

Most recipes also advise adding soap or washing up liquid to help it spread over leaves.

What’s Monsanto’s rationale here?

Why does Burtscher think that Scotts brought out this product? “The World Health Organisations’ cancer agency IARC has stated that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto has admitted in court that it cannot claim that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer because the complete formulation has never been tested.

“Garden centres are wondering what they can tell their customers. They have undoubtedly lost business. Some have phased out all chemical pesticides, such as Bellaflora, which took this step in cooperation with GLOBAL 2000 long before IARC came out with its verdict.”

Burtscher says that in the case of Bellaflora, the NGO didn’t need to apply much pressure: “The expertise came from the company. Now they only sell organic-approved plant protection products.”

But why does Burtscher think Scotts are calling its new vinegar-based herbicide Roundup? “Maybe Scotts thought: We need this trade name because people see Roundup as more effective than vinegar!”

Toxic adjuvants in the new Roundup? Or just soap?

Burtscher spent about €30 on the glyphosate-free Roundup but says in future he will just buy vinegar if it works out cheaper. It may also be safer, he adds, since “We do not know if the vinegar-based Roundup formulation still contains toxic adjuvants.”

(‘Adjuvants’ are additives present in glyphosate herbicide formulations that are designed to increase the toxicity of glyphosate to plants, for example by ‘fixing’ them to leaves and reduce wash-off in rain. But they can also increase the toxicity to animals, as in the case of tallowamine often used with glyphosate.)

But if Scotts can prove the safety of the adjuvants, Burtscher says it’s a win-win situation: “It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment.”

One thing is certain: glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.

The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).

On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.

The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.

He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”

In fact, organic and other gardeners have long been using vinegar as a weedkiller, which works by sucking moisture out of plants’ leaves. It’s most effective if used in dry weather when plants are already water-stressed, and the vinegar won’t get washed off or diluted by rain.

Most recipes also advise adding soap or washing up liquid to help it spread over leaves.

What’s Monsanto’s rationale here?

Why does Burtscher think that Scotts brought out this product? “The World Health Organisations’ cancer agency IARC has stated that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto has admitted in court that it cannot claim that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer because the complete formulation has never been tested.

“Garden centres are wondering what they can tell their customers. They have undoubtedly lost business. Some have phased out all chemical pesticides, such as Bellaflora, which took this step in cooperation with GLOBAL 2000 long before IARC came out with its verdict.”

Burtscher says that in the case of Bellaflora, the NGO didn’t need to apply much pressure: “The expertise came from the company. Now they only sell organic-approved plant protection products.”

But why does Burtscher think Scotts are calling its new vinegar-based herbicide Roundup? “Maybe Scotts thought: We need this trade name because people see Roundup as more effective than vinegar!”

Toxic adjuvants in the new Roundup? Or just soap?

Burtscher spent about €30 on the glyphosate-free Roundup but says in future he will just buy vinegar if it works out cheaper. It may also be safer, he adds, since “We do not know if the vinegar-based Roundup formulation still contains toxic adjuvants.”

(‘Adjuvants’ are additives present in glyphosate herbicide formulations that are designed to increase the toxicity of glyphosate to plants, for example by ‘fixing’ them to leaves and reduce wash-off in rain. But they can also increase the toxicity to animals, as in the case of tallowamine often used with glyphosate.)

But if Scotts can prove the safety of the adjuvants, Burtscher says it’s a win-win situation: “It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment.”

One thing is certain: glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.

The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).

On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.

The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.

He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”

In fact, organic and other gardeners have long been using vinegar as a weedkiller, which works by sucking moisture out of plants’ leaves. It’s most effective if used in dry weather when plants are already water-stressed, and the vinegar won’t get washed off or diluted by rain.

Most recipes also advise adding soap or washing up liquid to help it spread over leaves.

What’s Monsanto’s rationale here?

Why does Burtscher think that Scotts brought out this product? “The World Health Organisations’ cancer agency IARC has stated that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto has admitted in court that it cannot claim that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer because the complete formulation has never been tested.

“Garden centres are wondering what they can tell their customers. They have undoubtedly lost business. Some have phased out all chemical pesticides, such as Bellaflora, which took this step in cooperation with GLOBAL 2000 long before IARC came out with its verdict.”

Burtscher says that in the case of Bellaflora, the NGO didn’t need to apply much pressure: “The expertise came from the company. Now they only sell organic-approved plant protection products.”

But why does Burtscher think Scotts are calling its new vinegar-based herbicide Roundup? “Maybe Scotts thought: We need this trade name because people see Roundup as more effective than vinegar!”

Toxic adjuvants in the new Roundup? Or just soap?

Burtscher spent about €30 on the glyphosate-free Roundup but says in future he will just buy vinegar if it works out cheaper. It may also be safer, he adds, since “We do not know if the vinegar-based Roundup formulation still contains toxic adjuvants.”

(‘Adjuvants’ are additives present in glyphosate herbicide formulations that are designed to increase the toxicity of glyphosate to plants, for example by ‘fixing’ them to leaves and reduce wash-off in rain. But they can also increase the toxicity to animals, as in the case of tallowamine often used with glyphosate.)

But if Scotts can prove the safety of the adjuvants, Burtscher says it’s a win-win situation: “It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment.”

One thing is certain: glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

A new type of Roundup is on sale in Austrian garden centres. It’s the same old bottle with the same familiar brand name and is marketed by Scotts, under licence from Monsanto.

The only difference compared with the old-style Roundup is that the new one has a prominent label on the front saying it’s formulated “without glyphosate” (“ohne Glyphosat” in German).

On the back, on the ingredients label, the ‘active substance’ is defined as none other than vinegar: ‘Essigsäure’.

The new product was bought by Dr Helmut Burtscher, a biochemist who works for the Vienna-based NGO GLOBAL 2000, (the Austrian affiliate to Friends of the Earth International) in a garden centre in Vienna.

He learned of the glyphosate-free Roundup in a brochure sent to his house advertising new products. His reaction? “I laughed – but then I went quickly to the store to see if it was really true or a joke. It was real.”

In fact, organic and other gardeners have long been using vinegar as a weedkiller, which works by sucking moisture out of plants’ leaves. It’s most effective if used in dry weather when plants are already water-stressed, and the vinegar won’t get washed off or diluted by rain.

Most recipes also advise adding soap or washing up liquid to help it spread over leaves.

What’s Monsanto’s rationale here?

Why does Burtscher think that Scotts brought out this product? “The World Health Organisations’ cancer agency IARC has stated that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen. Monsanto has admitted in court that it cannot claim that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer because the complete formulation has never been tested.

“Garden centres are wondering what they can tell their customers. They have undoubtedly lost business. Some have phased out all chemical pesticides, such as Bellaflora, which took this step in cooperation with GLOBAL 2000 long before IARC came out with its verdict.”

Burtscher says that in the case of Bellaflora, the NGO didn’t need to apply much pressure: “The expertise came from the company. Now they only sell organic-approved plant protection products.”

But why does Burtscher think Scotts are calling its new vinegar-based herbicide Roundup? “Maybe Scotts thought: We need this trade name because people see Roundup as more effective than vinegar!”

Toxic adjuvants in the new Roundup? Or just soap?

Burtscher spent about €30 on the glyphosate-free Roundup but says in future he will just buy vinegar if it works out cheaper. It may also be safer, he adds, since “We do not know if the vinegar-based Roundup formulation still contains toxic adjuvants.”

(‘Adjuvants’ are additives present in glyphosate herbicide formulations that are designed to increase the toxicity of glyphosate to plants, for example by ‘fixing’ them to leaves and reduce wash-off in rain. But they can also increase the toxicity to animals, as in the case of tallowamine often used with glyphosate.)

But if Scotts can prove the safety of the adjuvants, Burtscher says it’s a win-win situation: “It’s a victory for Monsanto because now it has a product that doesn’t cause harm and a victory for people and the environment.”

One thing is certain: glyphosate-free Roundup is a product whose time has come.

Claire Robinson is managing editor at GMWatch, a public news and information service on issues surrounding GM crops and foods.

This article was originally published by GMWatch.

During election time, everyone wants to know what the public think. Polls abound trying to gauge our mood on a host of different issues so it’s good to see that public support for wind and solar is at an all-time high according to the results of a quarterly tracking survey conducted by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. 

And as all parties finalise their manifestos they would do well to take heed the findings.

Onshore wind is backed by nearly three quarters of the public (73%), with offshore even more popular at 79% while solar has almost universal support at 86%.  Less well-known renewables are also popular with wave and tidal power supported by 79% of the public.  These are all record highs since the tracking started in 2013. 

Even biomass, another lower carbon energy source, is at its highest favourability level of 66%, with only 6% opposed. In fact only 1% of the population is ‘strongly opposed’ to renewables the survey found.

Concern about climate change seems to be a driver of this clean energy push, with 71% saying they are very or fairly concerned. The economic and environmental case for renewables has long been clear.  Getting ourselves off polluting fossil fuels is essential if we’re to meet our international obligations to decarbonise and create an energy system fit for the 21^st century.  And as far back as 2015 onshore wind became the cheapest form of electricity, beating fossil fuels even without subsidies.  

For a long time it was believed opposition to renewables came from the ‘nimbyism’ of not wanting to look at wind turbines outside the back window. But this seems to be changing with 6 out of 10 people (58%) saying they would be happy to have a large-scale renewable energy development in their area. Seventy per cent recognised that renewable industries and developments provide economic benefits to the UK.

The overwhelming support for renewables is even more stark when compared with the results for other energy options. Nuclear is pretty stable with 38% in favour and 22% against, but things really start to drop off when the public were asked about fracking: Only 19% offered support, with 30% opposed and 49% indifferent. The most common reason for opposing fracking was the loss or destruction of the natural environment at 56 per cent, which shows that there remains a high level of concern among the public for environmental protection in Britain.

The tide is clearly flowing in favour of ditching fossil fuels, not only here in the UK but also abroad.  Both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the two candidates in the run to be the next French President, have promised to ban fracking.  Front runner, Macron, has also come out strongly for renewables promising to double wind and solar capacity by 2022.   

China’s big push for renewables is well known but even in Trump’s United States the growth of renewables is striking. There are already more jobs in US solar than in generating electricity through coal, oil and gas combined and renewables are generating jobs 12 times faster than the rest of the economy.  

Like in the UK, clean energy is a hit with people across the political spectrum. If deep red Texas was its own country it would be the sixth largest generator of wind power and there are now more renewable energy projects in Republican districts than Democrat ones.

Elections are naturally divisive times for a country – this one more so than usual following the EU referendum which split the UK down the middle. But for all parties looking to find policies for their manifestos that receive widespread support and unite the country, they need look no further than embracing renewables and accelerating the big shift from dirty to clean energy.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor to The Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe 

The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) annual meeting in Yokohama Japan this week marks its 50th anniversary. Yet there is little to celebrate.

ADB operations around the world have left a trail of destruction; people displaced and negative impacts on farming lands, rivers, forests and the climate.

The bank claims to finance development with the aim of alleviating poverty in the Asia Pacific region. Despite this noble vision, the ADB fails to provide a better future for Asia’s poorest. Its neoliberal policies are grossly inadequate at addressing perhaps the greatest threat to Asia’s poor: climate change.

The ADB actually recognizes climate change as a fundamental threat to poverty alleviation. Climate change will hit the poorest the hardest as, to use ADB’s own words,

“they encounter more intense tropical storms, more severe and more frequent droughts and floods, accelerated melting of glaciers and rises in the sea level, higher frequency of forest fires, shortages of freshwater, threatened crop production and aquaculture, higher incidence of heat-related and infectious diseases.”

Yet despite this, the bank has repeatedly prioritised the financing of coal projects over renewable energy alternatives. Coal is the biggest single contributor to human induced global warming.

The ADB even recognises the role of coal fired power in exacerbating climate change. But in the last decade they have invested over $3 billion in coal projects. They are the world’s third largest multilateral public financier of coal infrastructure.

India: ‘damage to local communities’ health and livelihoods’

Perhaps their most controversial project to date is the $450 million investment in the 4,000-megawatt Tata Mundra Ultra Mega Coal plant in the Indian state of Gujarat.

The bank’s own compliance review panel exposed a lack of consultation with local communities and a failure to comply with waste and pollution management strategies. Shortcomings that resulted in significant harm to the local environment and damage to local communities’ health and livelihoods.

The Tata Mundra plant is estimated to be India’s third largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Coal dust from conveyor belts feeding the power station threaten human health and contaminate agriculture. Infrastructure has damaged groundwater systems, polluting local communities’ drinking water sources.

But thanks to the ‘legal immunity for investments’ the ADB enjoys, it cannot be held responsible for these crimes. So, after 50 years of getting away with this impunity Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific joins other social movements to demand the withdrawal of ADB immunity. This would at least enable people to sue the bank for the impacts its coal funding has on local communities and climate change.

Many multilateral banks have reduced their coal funding in response to climate obligations. Sadly none have stopped funding coal altogether.

Given the danger that burning coal poses to the global climate, it’s time the ADB took some moral leadership. The bank must ban the funding of all coal projects. It should use its influence to encourage other multilateral and bilateral public lending institutions to do the same [1].

This is a particularly pertinent point, given the emergence of new lending institutions which, sadly, seem to be embracing coal. For example, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which claims to be a “green, clean, lean” bank for the region. Yet the AIIB’s draft energy strategy states that “coal-fired power plants would be considered if they replace existing less efficient capacity.”

The ADB could therefore play a crucial role in halting coal financing.

The time to stop funding coal is now!

The Asian Development Bank is facing increasing pressure from all sides; internationally, locally and from its own shareholders. The hypocrisy of their climate action public relations spin is becoming increasingly untenable as climate change becomes a daily reality for Asia’s poor.

Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific therefore call on the ADB to:

1. Rule out funding any future coal mine or coal fired power station projects;

2. Prioritise the development and establishment of sustainable renewable energy projects and promote community energy and energy efficiency to meet the energy needs of people in the Asia Pacific

3. Use their profile to lobby other finance institutions in the Asia Pacific region to rule out funding of coal projects; and

4. Urgently review the impacts of oil, gas and unconventional gas projects on local communities and the climate, and to rule out projects that exacerbate environmental degradation and climate change.

Report: ‘Stop coal financing in the Asia Pacific‘ is published today by Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific.

Hemantha Withanage is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Centre for Environmental Justice, Sri Lanka. An Executive Member of Friends of the Earth International, he is also the Convenor of Sri Lankan Working Group on Trade and IFIs, and has been a member of the ELAW (Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide) since 1991.

References

1. Japan, China, South Korea – are the first, 3rd and 6th biggest shareholders within the ADB – their bilateral agencies are the world’s largest financiers for coal (source: NRDC and Oil Change, Nov. 2016)

It’s been over 60 years since the first nuclear power plant was switched on in Russia and now 31 years (last week) since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Yet despite the decades-long history of nuclear power, most countries still haven’t agreed on a way to safely store nuclear waste.

Leading the way is Finland with the world’s first permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel. High-level radioactive waste is to be buried 400 metres deep in the granite bedrock of Olkiluoto Island off the Finnish coast, where its operators claim it will be secure for the next 100,000 years.

Governments, on the whole, aren’t good at long term planning though. And this is a major problem for the nuclear industry where eventualities must be planned for in terms of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years.

Teams of artists and philosophers are even debating how to mark repository sites to warn off future generations who may be as removed from us as we are from the first homo sapiens to arrive in Europe.

Even the more easily grasped timescales involved in nuclear waste disposal pose huge technical, economic and social challenges. Finland is to start loading the Olkiluoto repository in 2020 and the process is expected to take 100 years. That may seem like a long time, and it is considering that the first observed nuclear reaction was made less than 100 years ago in 1919.

Sweden, which is pushing forward with the same technology as Finland, is the only other European country close to such an advanced stage of planning. Favourable geological conditions and relatively small quantities of just one type of waste – spent fuel, without the additional problems of reprocessed waste – mean both countries have advantages over other nuclear nations.

For the most part,says Stephen Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Energy Policy at Greenwich University, high-level radioactive waste is lying around waiting for a solution.

“Around the world, everybody is extending the spent fuel storage and reactors. Find me a reactor that’s been in operation for 20 years and I’ll find you a plant which has had its spent fuel facility increased. Every one. There’s nowhere to put it,” says Thomas.

Public resistance

In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a full phase out nuclear power by 2022, making Europe’s largest economy a trailblazer in renewable energy.

Back in 1977, Germany was seen as a pioneer of disposal solutions when it began exploring a former salt mine at Gorleben as a possible repository. From the start, locals protested vehemently. A decades-long battle ensued with intense debate over whether the site was geologically suitable. Some experts claimed that with its location in a sparsely populated area close to the then border with East Germany, the site was selected more for political than scientific reasons. In 2000 the government put a moratorium on the investigation.

A bill passed this year will see Gorleben back on the agenda as a possible waste site, in a search that views the country as a “blank map”, with salt, granite and clay sites all to be considered.

Officially, a site is to be identified by 2031 and built by 2050. But the state of Saxony is already pushing to be excluded from the process and some experts say this bid looks highly optimistic.

In the UK, exploration of a potential site conveniently close to the Sellafield decommissioning and reprocessing site – home to by far the country’s worst nuclear waste problem – stalled and was cancelled following a public and scientific consultation process.

In France, the plan for a clay repository near the village of Bure is more advanced than most. French nuclear agency ANDRA plans to have it ready by 2035. But observers say there has been a lack of public consultation and public protests are heating up ahead of an upcoming parliamentary vote over the site’s future.

Unknown costs

Besides the technical and political issues surrounding final disposal there are also massive economic challenges.

In the UK, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority forecast that the current cost of clean-up is somewhere between £95 billion (840 billion yuan) and £219 billion (2 trillion yuan), based on the data available. The total planned expenditure for 2017/2018 is £3.24 billion (20 billion yuan), of which £2.36 billion (20 billion yuan) will be funded by the government and the taxpayer; £0.88 billion by income from commercial operations.

In Germany, nuclear power plant operators are largely responsible for decommissioning reactors once they are switched off – this is where spent fuel is removed and sites dismantled – a process that takes decades in itself.

Under an agreement reached last year, waste disposal is now the responsibility of the state. Utilities are to pay 23.6 billion euros (177 billion yuan) into a state-administered fund to cover this. But experts worry that ultimately, taxpayers will be left footing the bill.

“For all the waste management and disposal of waste there is no technical concept and so you cannot estimate costs,” says Wolfgang Irrek, professor for energy management at Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Instead, the calculation is based on 20-year-old estimates for the Gorleben site.

Long-term intermediate storage

Some experts say final disposal is a bit of a red herring in any case. As appealing as the idea of settling the matter once and for all might be, questions have been raised about the long-term security of even the Finnish project.

“It’s very arrogant, scientifically, to say today we have safe disposal for tens of thousands of years,” says Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear policy analyst and lead author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. “I am not convinced geological storage is good forever – I have not seen the argument made conclusively. It’s too early to say.”

Instead, Schneider advocates a focus on ensuring that interim storage is up to the job, which, for the most part, it isn’t.

“We have got into problems with waste because it has been packaged on the assumption that it would go in the ground at a certain time, and it hasn’t, and the packaging has degraded,” Thomas says.

The UK and France have used wet storage for spent nuclear fuel, meaning the waste is kept in pools for long periods of time. Schneider says if there is anything to be learned from the European experience with nuclear waste it’s to take the German route of getting the cooled waste out of the water and into dry storage as quickly as possible.

“There is absolutely no doubt that dry storage is much safer and much more secure than pool storage,” says Schneider. “If you lose the water you are in trouble because the fuel will heat up. Depending on the age of the fuel, you might get fuel fires that will dwarf the nuclear accidents we have seen so far.”

He points to the Fukushima disaster, where it was initially unclear if a spent fuel fire was on the cards; a scenario which would have called for the evacuation of at least 10 million people.

In the UK, Andrew Blowers of independent expert group Nuclear Waste Advisory Associates says the locations of planned reactors pose their own set of problems.

“A lot of dangerous spent fuel is going to be stored on new-build sites which are in vulnerable coastal locations, which stacks up to a huge problem for the next century with climate change”, says Blowers.

Tip of the iceberg

And all this concerns only a tiny fraction of the overall radioactive waste problem. “High-level waste represents the smallest volume”, says Schneider. “The biggest volumes are [found] the lower you go in the contamination levels. A single uranium mine, like the German Wismut, can generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of waste.”

Decommissioning generates huge volumes of contaminated material. Intermediate-level waste storage repositories in Germany have also been fraught with technical and public acceptance problems, while decommissioning in the UK has seen costs spiral out of control.

“Britain is an example of how to make provisions for decommissioning wrong – we have made every mistake it is possible to make and have ended up with a nuclear authority that has no money”, Thomas says.

Germany has decided to phase out nuclear power altogether. Having defined volumes of material to deal with should give it some advantage, but Thomas says there is still too little experience of decommissioning to really know what the country is in for.

“The amount of decommissioning that has gone on in the world is negligible. I think there are six plants that have been fully decommissioned that operated for a decent amount of time.”

Still, Blowers says Germany’s got one thing right. “What we don’t want is more nuclear waste created when we are not at all sure what we are going to do with what we’ve already got.”

This Author

Ruby Russell is a Berlin-based journalist whose work has been published by Deutsche Welle, Clean Energy Wire, the Guardian and the Ecologist, among others

He has been accused of being anti-development, threatened, kidnapped and jailed, but Prafulla Samantara has never given up. The 65-year-old from Bhubaneswar, Odisha State, India, has made it his life’s work to fight injustice by lending a voice to Indigenous communities and small scale farmers. Now he has won the prestigious 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize for Asia for his relentless efforts.

Most notably, he orchestrated the campaigns throughout the decade-long court battle against British mining company Vedanta, which wanted to build a massive open-pit aluminium mine on one of India’s holy mountains, which is inhabited by the Dongira Tribe. Considered by some a real-life ‘Avatar story’, it culminated in a triumphant Supreme Court ruling in 2013 which stopped the mine’s construction.  

Samantara says he felt something had to be done as soon as he heard about the plans to mine the Nyamgiri Hills in India’s north-eastern Odisha state back in 2004.

“I felt it was my duty to protect it, convince and campaign among the tribals, and help them understand what could happen in the future,” says Samantara, who mobilised the indigenous population to stand up to the company.

“Throughout my lifelong career as a social and political activist, I always feel I’m just doing my duty as a citizen of this country,” he says.

“I always thought that without the consent of the people and without the participation of the people, no development should take place.”

Sacred hills and mesmerising beauty

And there was much at stake: an area of amazing beauty and biodiversity, the densely forested slopes and deep gorges of the Nyamgiri Hills are an important migration corridor for elephants and home to the mighty Bengal tiger. Its more than 100 streams flow down from the peaks toward the Bay of Bengal.

Its rulers are the 8,000-strong Indigenous Dongira Kondh tribe which, together with the Jharania and Kutia tribes, call these hills their home. Far from the hustle and bustle of the rapidly industrialising cities, they live off small plantations on the fertile slopes. “Their habitat is on the upper side of the Nyamgiri Hills. It’s very important for their identity, culturally, socially and economically,” Samantara says.

Worshippers of the mountain god ‘Niyam Raja’ and his sacred hills – including the 4,000-metre-high Mountain of the Law (Niyam Dongar) – the tribes consider the area sacred and it must be protected at all costs, Samantara explains, adding “They live after their own laws, the law of the gods, which is of crucial cultural importance to the Dongira Tribes.”

But beneath the ground hides a large bauxite deposit, an aluminium ore, and the companies seeking to extract it weren’t going to give up without a fight. It all began in 2004, when the Odisha State Mining Company signed an agreement with UK-based Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite in the hills.

Samantara read about a public hearing to discuss the project in the papers. Having already fought a similar mining project elsewhere, he knew it would also be an environmental threat to the area.

The $2 billion open-pit mine would extract more than 70 million tons of bauxite and destroy an estimated 1,660 acres of forest. New roads would be built to reach the mine, making the forest an easy target for loggers and poachers. It could also pollute the water for millions of people, he says. “It’s an important water source to non-tribal areas too. The two rivers Bansadhara and Nagaballi are fed with water from these hills. There are 36 natural streams feeding these two rivers.”

He knew the tribes had no way of knowing about the plans and set out to tell them. When they didn’t believe him, he travelled from village to village across the hills to talk to the leaders. But his opponents were right behind him and he was intimidated, threatened and eventually kidnapped by people he suspects were hired by the mining company.

Victory at last

Determined to carry on, he travelled by train to remote stations, cycling or walking from town to town through the vast forests. Eventually the villagers got behind the cause and Samantara filed a petition with the Supreme Court’s panel governing mining activities. There followed rallies and protests, and as the case gained attention, company backers like the Norwegian Pension Fund and the Church of England began to divest funds from Vedanta.

Fast forward to 18 April 2013, and finally, after 12 years of campaigning and court appearances, the Supreme Court issued an historic ruling which empowered local communities to vote on mining projects in their areas. The vote resulted in a unanimous No vote by all 12 tribal village councils – an unprecedented victory which could now help future Indigenous groups protect their land.

But it was not all plain sailing. The miners tried to get a new vote, arguing that some tribes have since changed leaders, but it was stopped by another appeal by Samantara, and the Nyamgiri Hills are now safe in the hands of its inhabitants.

A great victory for all, but not the first time Samantara was involved in protesting injustice.

A lifetime protesting capitalism and commercialisation

Having grown up in a family of farmers in rural Odisha, Samantara has witnessed the area’s transformation from tranquil small-scale farmland to an industrialised urban neighbourhood driven by commercial growth. As a student of law and economics, he hoped to help curb the growing social injustice and inequality he saw around him in the seventies, saying: “I was part of these struggles to change the system. It was corrupt and undemocratic.”

He was once arrested at a student protest and imprisoned for a year. “There was national emergency in 1975 to 1977. As a student leader I was kept in jail for one year in January 1976 for my protest to the [state of] emergency to protect democratic and fundamental rights of citizens.”

A career campaigner, he’s had to rely on donations and his wife’s income as a geology professor at times. Now a veteran, he believes people are ultimately good, despite all the resistance he’s encountered. “I’m always optimistic, because I believe in the power of the people.”

As we speak, he’s just about to take off to London and then San Francisco for the prize ceremony. But as an advocate for minimum resource usage, he is not wowed by fancy hotels and flair. “Even when I’m offered luxury, I don’t enjoy it.”

Now, his work continues with campaigns against other mining projects and chemicals used in agriculture. The Odisha State government has given permission for four bauxite mines in the Kodingamali Hills – home to the Parja tribe which depend on the forest for their survival – and Samantara is challenging the project.

So what drives the 65-year-old to carry on? It’s all about learning to live alongside nature. “We need to preserve nature for future generations of man and animals,” he says.

His message is simple: “We must work for people that are marginalised. In India and other third world countries Indigenous people are marginalised, even though they are the owners of the natural resources, but they are being driven out in the name of development,” he says.

“When Indigenous peoples are alienated from nature, that nature is not safe.”

The Goldman Environmental Prize

Samantara is one of six winners, one for each of the continental regions, of the Goldman Environmental Prize – aka the Nobel Prize for environmentalists – awarded annually to men and women who take great personal risks to safeguard the environment. It was created in 1989 by civic leaders and philanthropists Richard N. Goldman and his wife, Rhoda H. Goldman. Learn more at www.goldmanprize.org

This Author

Sophie Morlin-Yron is a freelance writer based in London. Follow her on @sophiemyron