It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, August 21, 2026
US Tobacco companies flooded federal comment process that stalled menthol cigarette ban
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed banning menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars in 2022, nearly 250,000 public comments flooded in – a record response that led the administration of President Joe Biden to delay a final decision.
But a Rutgers Health analysis shows that a minority came from concerned individuals inspired to speak out about the proposed ban in their own words.
The study in JAMA Network Open examined all 246,808 comments submitted to FDA dockets and found that 97% of comments on the menthol rule and 93% on the cigar rule were form letters. Roughly 46% of the menthol form letters contained content traceable to tobacco companies, including Reynolds American Inc.’s “Own It, Voice It” campaign and Altria Group Inc.’s “Voices for Consumer Choice” campaign. Two percent of all comments were unique.
“The sheer volume of comments was used as a reason to delay a public health policy that would have saved lives,” said Andrea Villanti, professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, deputy director of the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies and lead author of the study. “What wasn’t considered was how few of those submissions were unique or how much tobacco company influence had shaped both the volume and the content of the comments.”
The researchers downloaded the publicly available comments and used statistical software to identify recurring phrases, ultimately matching submissions to 17 distinct form-letter templates. After removing form letters and near-duplicates, they analyzed the remaining 3,342 unique menthol comments and 1,432 unique cigar comments.
Even among unique comments, 96% opposed the menthol ban, and 99% opposed the cigar ban. But the leading arguments were economic: loss of revenue and sales, fears of an illicit market and claims that education would work better than prohibition. Few unique comments (3-5%) addressed the health evidence behind the rules.
The study is part of an ongoing Rutgers project examining how disinformation shaped the debate over menthol and flavored tobacco policies, work that has traced industry arguments from their origins to their effects.
An earlier study in the project, led by Ollie Ganz, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, analyzed direct-to-consumer emails that tobacco companies sent customers during the comment period. The emails urged recipients to “take action” and steered them to company-run websites that assembled personalized antiban letters from menus of prewritten arguments, then submitted them to the FDA.
Another study in the project, led by Olivia Wackowski, a professor at the School of Public Health, analyzed 122 news articles about the menthol rule and found that press coverage presented a more balanced picture: Seventy-five percent of articles cited the ban’s potential to reduce disease and save lives, while opposition arguments centered on concerns about increased policing in Black communities.
The policing argument invoked the 2014 death of Eric Garner, which came at the hands of New York police who were trying to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes. Villanti said this argument is designed to mislead the public because FDA product standards regulate what tobacco companies can manufacture and sell, not individual purchase or use of these products.
“Taken together, these findings show how the tobacco industry influence can shape policy debates in ways that obscure scientific evidence and distort perceptions of public opinion,” said Kymberle Sterling, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and co-author of the new study. “As a result, Black communities and other populations disproportionately targeted by the marketing of menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars continue to bear an unequal burden of tobacco-related harms when evidence-based protections are delayed, weakened, or withdrawn.”
Menthol cigarettes account for more than a third of the U.S. cigarette market and a majority of the cigarettes smoked by Black Americans, and researchers have estimated they caused 378,000 premature deaths in the United States between 1980 and 2018. Menthol anesthetizes the throat, making smoke easier to inhale for first-time smokers; studies show that the products are also more difficult to quit, especially for Black Americans.
The FDA sent final rules to the White House for review in 2023, but the Biden administration postponed action in April 2024, and the rules were withdrawn in January 2025.
“FDA’s rules on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars are science-based policies designed to protect public health,” Villanti said. “One in five deaths in the U.S. is still attributable to tobacco smoking, and lack of action on these policies will have lasting impacts on the lives of American people and communities.”
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01MD018728. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Public Comments and Federal Rulemaking for Menthol Cigarettes and Flavored Cigars
Article Publication Date
20-Aug-2026
COI Statement
Dr Villanti reported receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the conduct of the study. Ms Tomaino reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Ms Johnson reported receiving grants from the NIH during the conduct of the study. Dr Garmon reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Ms Altunbilek reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Dr Wackowski reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Dr Ganz reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Dr Allem reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Mr Schroth reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Dr Fryer reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. Dr Sterling reported receiving grants from NIH during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported
Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history
Scientists carbon-dated more than 7,500 marine fossils from ocean beds around the world and used that data to determine which environmental factors are most responsible for mixing together fossils from different time periods in the same stratum.
Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history
Key points
Over the course of 20 years, an international team of scientists collected and carbon-dated more than 7,500 marine fossils from ocean beds around the world.
Scientists used the dataset to determine which of several environmental factors contributes most to time averaging, a phenomenon in which organisms that lived in different time periods are mixed and preserved together in the same fossil bed.
The results indicate that sedimentation is more important than other factors, such as the number of burrowing animals in a given area or the durability of fossils.
The study, published in the journal PNAS, establishes guidelines regarding the types of research questions paleontologists can investigate using fossil samples.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- In productive marine environments, a square meter of seafloor can be perforated by hundreds to thousands of isolated and interconnected tunnels through which crawl and writhe a cornucopia of clams, shrimp, sea stars, sand dollars, snails, worms and other animals. All that excavation mixes up the sediment, along with any shells and other skeletal remains that happen to be there. This temporal smearing is a problem for paleontologists, because when that piece of seafloor is buried and becomes part of the fossil record, it’s difficult and expensive to figure out how much mixing took place.
“What continually amazes me is just how much time a bunch of fossils collected from a single sediment layer can represent. In some cases, well-preserved fossil organisms that are found next to each other might have lived hundreds or thousands of years apart,” wrote Rafal Nawrot, a paleontologist at the University of Vienna.
The mixing of fossils that lived at different times but are preserved together is called time averaging.
According to Daniele Scarponi, a colleague of Nawrot’s and an associate professor at the University of Bologna, time averaging dictates the types of questions paleontologists can ask.
“Before interpreting a fossil assemblage, we need to know the interval it represents. Some fossil assemblages are like the ruins of Pompeii — buried rapidly and thus providing a snapshot of past communities frozen in time. Others are more akin to a prehistoric graveyard used continuously over centuries, in which human remains from different generations are slowly accumulating over time. Both types can provide valuable insights into the past, but the kinds of data we can extract from them will be different in each case,” Scarponi wrote.
In addition to burrowing animals, several other factors influence time averaging, including:
The durability of organic material is important. Most organisms decompose or get picked apart by scavengers before they become fossilized. For this reason, both the marine and terrestrial fossil records are primarily composed of hard skeletal material, like shells and bones. But even these break and disintegrate if they aren’t preserved quickly enough.
Another important factor is the rate of sedimentation, which occurs unevenly in different parts of the ocean and changes through time. Deltas, for example, have high rates of sedimentation, whereas other areas might only receive a fine dusting over long periods of time. If sedimentation is slow, skeletal remains of organisms accumulate over long periods of time, but if sedimentation is fast, the remains are buried quicker, and age mixing is reduced.
Biological productivity is also crucial. The number of fossils paleontologists can expect to find while digging in one spot is strongly correlated with the number of organisms that were previously around to be fossilized in the first place.
Through a project that was 20 years in the making, members of an international consortium of scientists say they have determined which of these factors is the most important for time averaging and thus primarily controls the temporal resolution of paleontological data.
“Our results demonstrate that if we know how quickly sediment accumulates — which can be deduced from the environmental context — we can determine how much time is captured by a given fossil assemblage: The faster individual shells or bones are buried below the sediment surface, the less likely it is that remains from multiple generations of organisms will accumulate and be preserved together,” Nawrot wrote.
Sedimentation rates have long been anticipated to be an important component of time averaging, but gathering data needed to rigorously and comprehensively assess this issue is difficult, time-consuming and very expensive.
By integrating multiple projects, the authors analyzed more than 7,500 fossils, which were dated using radiocarbon and other methods and collected from a variety of oceanic environments around the world, from shallow coastal settings to the edges of continental shelves.
The various research groups involved in the project — which includes scientists based in Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Slovakia and the United States — separately collected, studied and published papers on the fossils over a period of two decades. When they learned of each other’s work, they decided to join forces and share data.
“Nothing of this scale has ever been attempted before because it’s simply not feasible to do so, but thanks to the fact that we had a whole bunch of teams that worked on similar topics and used similar methods, we were able to compile it,” said the study’s co-lead author, Michal Kowalewski, the Thompson chair of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Radiometric dating, one of the primary methods the authors used, takes advantage of the fact that radioactive atoms always decay into more stable, non-radioactive atoms at a steady, predictable rate. This allows scientists to estimate the age of minerals and fossils.
Many animals have skeletons that contain a type of radioactive isotope called carbon-14. Plants absorb carbon-14 during photosynthesis and use it to make more of themselves. Herbivores get carbon-14 secondhand by eating plants, carnivores get it from herbivores, and decomposers get it from all of the above. This list includes humans. Any part of your body that contains carbon — which is every part of your body — is radioactive. Fortunately, carbon-14 emits radiation in the form of electrons, which for us is kind of like receiving a constant but imperceptibly low-level electric shock — not at all like the cell-shredding gamma rays emitted by uranium.
Carbon-14 has a half-life – the amount of time it takes for half of any given number of radioactive atoms to decay — of around 5,730 years. That meant the authors were restricted to the most recent fossil record, up to 55,000 years old, which is about the cutoff when any remaining carbon-14 in a fossil can be reliably measured.
The researchers also used a technique known as amino-acid racemization, which uses ratios of amino acids. As in the case of carbon isotopes, the ratio of different forms of a given amino acid also changes through time in a predictable way.
The reason no one has attempted dating on such a grand scale before is primarily due to the high cost of radiocarbon and amino-acid dating. Most research groups can afford to obtain data for only a few dozen specimens, but thousands of specimens are needed to fully evaluate the scale and drivers of time averaging. Distributing the cost across multiple labs over two decades helped significantly reduce this barrier, as did recent technological advances in radiometric dating that lowered the cost and made it possible to use much smaller samples than was previously possible.
Through this unique collaboration, Kowalewski and his colleagues have what is possibly the largest collection of fossil carbon dates ever compiled, which can now be used on a variety of research topics that would have been intractable otherwise.
“The dataset is incredibly powerful. We’re now working on multiple follow-up projects that explore various aspects of time averaging and related processes. You can use it to answer a lot of questions, but of course, we started with the big one,” he said.
After compiling the carbon dates from their fossil specimens, the authors simulated age distributions by varying the rates of bioturbation (mixing caused by burrowing animals), sedimentation and fossil destruction. Then they compared the real age distribution of carbon-dated fossils with the different simulated distributions to see which of the models most closely matched the actual patterns observed in the data.
The results were unambiguous.
“Sometimes life turns out to be more exciting than you thought,” Kowalewski said. “In this case, the outcome is beyond any dreams we may have had when we started.”
Knowing that the rate of sedimentation is the single most important factor in determining the extent to which fossils of different ages become mixed will unlock research avenues that were previously restricted. And assuming the same pattern holds true for oceans further back in time, the results can be extended to fossils that are much older than the ones that still contain residual amounts of carbon-14.
The authors published their results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Additional co-authors of the study are: Adam Tomašových of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; Martin Zuschin, Bettina Bachmann, Michaela Berensmeier and Jan Steger of the University of Vienna; Paolo Albano of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn; Quan Hua of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation; Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University; Susan Kidwell of the University of Chicago; Matias Ritter of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; Marcello Simões of the Universidade Estadual Paulista; Luis Torres Jr. of the Florida Museum of Natural History; Lukas Schweigl of the University of Bologna; Troy Dexter of the University of The Bahamas; Ivo Gallmetzer of the Natural History Museum Vienna; Claudio Pellegrini of the National Research Council of Italy; and Matthew Kosnik of Macquarie University.
Sediment accumulation rate predicts the temporal resolution of marine fossil assemblages
SUNY Potsdam Faculty awarded National Science Foundation grant to study paleosalinity of ancient sedimentary rocks
SUNY Potsdam professors Dr. Page Quinton and Dr. Michael Rygel awarded $411,477 from National Science Foundation to further research on Devonian-Permian sedimentary rocks
Seen here placing minerals in the Geology Museum displays at SUNY Potsdam, Dr. Michael Rygel (left) and Dr. Page Quinton (right) were recently awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation to support their research on the salinity of ancient sedimentary rocks.
Two SUNY Potsdam geoscientists have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to investigate the chemistry of ancient waters preserved in sedimentary rocks across Atlantic Canada, research that could shed new light on the evolution of life on land and the distribution of energy and mineral resources.
Dr. Page Quinton and Dr. Michael Rygel, faculty members in SUNY Potsdam’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, were recently awarded $411,477 from the NSF for their project, "Salinity, Source Rocks, and Cyclothems: Using Paleosalinity Proxies to Track Marine Influence in the Maritimes Basin.” This three-year project will provide paid research experiences for SUNY Potsdam undergraduates and will involve field work in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.
“Beyond its pure scientific value, gaining a better understanding of the chemistry of these ancient waters could potentially improve our understanding of the distribution of energy and mineral resources in this part of the world,” Quinton said. “The techniques are new, and our background and expertise make us uniquely well qualified to do this work. Many of these rocks are exposed along remote and rugged parts of the coast… some are even along the shore of the Bay of Fundy and subject to the world’s highest tides.”
The Maritimes Basin contains thousands of feet of Devonian-Permian (about 419 to 251-million-year-old) sedimentary rocks of global significance. These strata comprise two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, have supported more than 200 years of resource-based economic activity, and have yielded important insights into Earth's organisms, ecosystems and evolutionary patterns.
“The rocks that we will be working on in Atlantic Canada provide a remarkably detailed and complete record of life fully conquering the terrestrial realm. Specifically, these rocks contain things like trackways of early amphibians, skeletal material from the oldest unequivocal reptiles, the first land snails, spectacular fossilized forests, the oldest evidence of parental care in synapsids (mammals and their extinct mammal-like ancestors), and the first evidence of coordinated movement of groups of organisms across the landscape,” Rygel said. “All of these things happened in or adjacent to wetlands that could have been fresh, brackish, or marine … we have no idea. Geologists have been wondering about the chemistry of these wetlands for nearly 200 years, and I’ve been thinking about it for over 25 years.”
Despite the importance of these rocks, fundamental questions about water chemistry during their deposition remain unanswered. This research will identify intervals that were influenced by marine waters and provide new information about the conditions that shaped the evolution of plant and animal life on land and the nature and distribution of economic resources in the basin.
“Traditionally, understanding how salty the waters were requires finding certain types of fossils. Despite nearly 200 years of looking, we’ve not found more than a handful of useful fossils. It could be that we’ve just not found them yet, it could be that something about the water chemistry made it difficult for certain types of life, or maybe the conventional approaches don’t work there. Rather than hoping we get lucky and finding the right kind of fossils, the new geochemical techniques that we will use will allow us to analyze the rocks directly and determine the chemistry of the waters that they formed in,” Quinton said.
The project will also provide paid hands-on research experience for undergraduate students, as well as teaching and research experience for future K-12 Earth science teachers—giving SUNY Potsdam undergraduates the opportunity to take part in high-impact practices.
“We will have our students participate in every aspect of the research process and operating as a research team will be great preparation for graduate school or the workforce. This experience will make them more competitive for what comes next because it will provide them with direction about what kinds of projects (field-based, lab-based, or both) they are interested in pursuing,” Rygel said. “These kinds of experiences allow students to take the theory they learn about in lecture and the skills they learn in lab and apply them to real world problems.”
This is not the first NSF-funded collaboration for Quinton and Rygel. In 2021, they received a $370,113 NSF Research in Undergraduate Institutions grant to investigate Earth's ancient climate cycles while mentoring student researchers through field studies in Montana and Texas.
They have also collaborated on developing a campus Geoscience Garden, and co-authored an open educational research textbook to benefit their students.
Dr. Page Quinton is a stable isotope geochemist who studies the connection between the carbon cycle, ancient climate change, and major mass extinction events. Research she conducted with colleagues at El Kef, Tunisia, received international attention when it was published in the journal Science in 2018. Recent work has included research focusing on the role of climate change in the dinosaur mass extinction event, understanding the impact of early land plants on shallow seas, and understanding the connection between sea level change and carbon cycling. This work has taken her to Australia, Canada and all over the U.S.
Dr. Michael Rygel has deep family ties to the steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania, and his research focuses on understanding the Paleozoic-aged rocks that these industries were built on. Specifically, he is a sedimentologist and stratigrapher who specializes in understanding ancient environments. His past research projects have focused on outcrops in the coal-bearing rocks in the Appalachian Basin in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the Maritimes Basin in Atlantic Canada, as well as coeval ancient glacial deposits in southeastern Australia.
SUNY Potsdam’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences prepares students for in-demand careers in the sciences, or for further study on the graduate or professional level. The department offers majors in environmental science and geology, including an option leading to geologic licensure, with a strong focus on both lab and field experience. SUNY Potsdam’s location in the St. Lawrence Valley near the Adirondack Mountains provides a natural laboratory for students.
About SUNY Potsdam:
Founded in 1816, The State University of New York at Potsdam is one of America’s first 50 colleges—and the oldest institution within SUNY. Now in its third century, SUNY Potsdam is distinguished by a legacy of pioneering programs and educational excellence. The College currently enrolls approximately 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Home to the world-renowned Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam is known for its challenging liberal arts and sciences core, distinction in teacher training and culture of creativity. To learn more, visit www.potsdam.edu.
Resurgence of malaria in Ethiopia
JAMA
About the Study:
This study examines whether emerging drug and diagnostic resistance variants are contributing to Ethiopia’s malaria resurgence.
Corresponding Authors: Ashenafi Assefa Bahita, PhD, Ethiopian Public Health Institute, Arbegnoch Street, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (ashyaega@yahoo.com); Jonathan B. Parr, MD, MPH, 130 Mason Farm Rd, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (jonathan_parr@med.unc.edu).
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Journal
JAMA
China’s solar expansion policy reduces bird diversity
Summary author: Walter Beckwith
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
The global push for solar energy could come with a hidden biodiversity cost, a study of more than 2,300 Chinese counties reports. According to the findings, stronger policies promoting solar development were associated with a decline in bird diversity, largely because ecologically diverse croplands and grasslands were converted to developed land. The expansion of renewable energy can help combat climate change, but large-scale solar development may create a new environmental trade-off by converting or fragmenting habitat and contributing to biodiversity loss. Because birds are relatively well monitored across large areas and respond sensitively to changes in vegetation, breeding habitat, and food availability, shifts in their diversity can reveal ecological impacts that conventional measures may overlook. In China, where rapidly growing solar capacity is expected to become a major component of the energy system, photovoltaic installations already cover thousands of square kilometers; they may increasingly affect bird populations and their habitats. Moreover, China’s solar power infrastructure has been strongly shaped by government policies, which have largely determined its location and scale.
Here, Huiming Zhang and colleagues investigated the ecological consequences of solar expansion.Zhang et al. assembled a large dataset covering 2,344 counties across China from 2014 to 2023. Their dataset combined bird observations, solar-energy policies, environmental conditions, and socioeconomic information. This allowed the authors to assess the relationship between solar-promoting policies and local bird diversity. They also looked at impacts of changes in land use, vegetation, and agricultural productivity. The findings revealed that stronger policies promoting solar expansion were associated with significant declines in bird diversity – a one-standard-deviation increase in policy intensity corresponded to a 2.10% reduction in the bird biodiversity index. These effects were strongest in wealthier and non-desert regions and disproportionately affected geographically widespread species. This was largely due to rapid land conversion, particularly the transformation of cropland and grassland into developed areas, which reduced vegetation diversity. Zhang et al. also identified a paradoxical pattern they call “inferior greening,” in which landscapes appeared greener based on higher Leaf Area Index but became ecologically poorer overall. “The next step is to move from biodiversity measurement to valuation by linking changes in bird diversity to ecosystem services and conservation values,” writes Yuanning Liang in a related Perspective. “Without such valuation, policy analysis gives insufficient weight to conservation, and benefit-cost analysis can understate the social cost of development. Just as climate policy requires credible estimates of climate damages to inform the social cost of carbon, credible estimates of biodiversity values are needed when sustainable development policies alter ecosystems.”
For reporters interested in topics on research integrity, co-author Kai Wu notes; “In our field, scientific integrity increasingly depends on transparent data practices, reproducible analytical frameworks, and responsible integration of interdisciplinary methods. As research increasingly connects climate change mitigation and adaptation, modern energy systems, and ecological processes with socioeconomic systems, developing shared standards for data validation and model transparency will be essential to ensure that scientific evidence can reliably inform global sustainability policies.”
Batteries are an essential part of our everyday lives. They are also central to the Green Transition, powering everything from electronic devices and electric vehicles to renewable energy storage. However, producing batteries has significant environmental impacts. Mining and processing raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, and recycling all contribute to a battery’s carbon footprint. In addition, battery supply chains are highly globalized, but the rules governing their environmental assessment are often developed at national or regional levels, making their footprint difficult to measure, report, and verify.
In a new paper titled “A Brussels Effect for Battery Sustainability,” researchers examine how the European Union’s Batteries Regulation could change this. As part of the study, IIASA scientists collaborated with researchers fromthe Leiden University in the Netherlands, Nanjing University in China, and ecoinvent in Switzerland.
The paper highlights that Europe currently plays a relatively limited role in several upstream stages of battery production. However, Europe remains heavily dependent on imports across many stages of the supply chain. This creates a fundamental challenge: batteries placed on the European market depend on raw materials, electricity, and manufacturing processes located in countries or regions with different reporting requirements.
Researchers explain that the EU Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 represents an important shift toward life-cycle-based sustainability governance. The paper also explores in detail the draft Delegated Act (DA) establishing the calculation and verification of the carbon footprint for electric vehicle batteries, the most technically developed DA supplementing the Regulation.
“The EU is in the process of formulating policy to ensure that the electric vehicle and large stationary batteries used in the EU are produced with low greenhouse gas emissions,” says Edgar Hertwich, study coauthor and Principal Research Scholar in the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. “Battery production requires a lot of materials and energy, and the emissions during production can be substantial if coal is used. Raw materials and components for batteries come from outside the EU, and so do most batteries. The proposed EU battery regulations require that importers document the emissions following a set of rules for evidence collection that the EU has defined.”
The paper shows that there are clear advantages to this approach. Standardized data and calculation methods can make environmental performance more comparable and potentially improve transparency across the market. However, the authors also highlight a potential trade-off between consistency and representativeness. For example, geographically specific and potentially more accurate data may be excluded if it does not meet the required compliance framework. The authors therefore argue for a more a rigorous yet representative approach, enabling the use of alternative data or modeling methods that demonstrate comparable accuracy and integrity.
“The challenge is not rigor versus representativeness,” says Ranran Wang, study coauthor and professor at Nanjing University. “We need a system that is rigorous enough to support credible sustainability claims, but also able to work with evidence generated across very different production contexts.”
Beyond Europe, beyond batteries
In the paper, researchers also point to a broader phenomenon: the Brussels Effect. Traditionally, the term describes how EU regulations can influence practices outside Europe because companies around the world choose to follow European rules to maintain access to the EU market. Classic examples of the Brussels Effect include the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which have demonstrated how EU regulations can become global reference points.
This could have implications beyond batteries. The battery passport is described in the paper as an early test case for a wider digital product passport system, with potential applications in other sectors, such as textiles and electronics.
“Overall, the rules could be a model for other products as well. Emissions along supply chains are a significant problem for all jurisdictions seeking to address greenhouse gas emissions from industry,” explains Hertwich. “The EU battery regulation could hence be a model for adoption for other products, such as EVs and AI models, and thus help other regions deal with the same problems. We welcome the policy and see it as a significant development that can make an important contribution to climate change mitigation. On the other hand, the system as proposed is EU-centric and has received too little input from other regions. Such a system would have more chance to yield actual emission reductions, and to be adopted by other regions, if the rules were co-designed with producing regions.”
Reference:
Liang, Y., Hertwich, E., Istrate, R., Valente, A., Wang, R., (2026). A Brussels Effect for Battery Sustainability. Science. DOI10.1126/science.aed8133.
