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)
Thursday, September 12, 2024
New study reveals food waste bans ineffective in reducing landfill waste, except in Massachusetts
Researchers call for reassessment of current policies, most of which have little to no effect, contrary to policymakers' expectations
Of the first five U.S. states to implement food waste bans, only Massachusetts was successful at diverting waste away from landfills and incinerators, according to a new study from the University of California Rady School of Management.
The paper, published today in Science, suggests a need to reevaluate current strategies, citing Massachusetts' approach as a benchmark for effective policy implementation.
Between 2014 and 2024, nine U.S. states made it unlawful for commercial waste generators—such as grocery chains—to dispose of their food waste in landfills, expecting a 10–15% waste reduction.
“We can say with high confidence that the combination of waste bans did not reduce landfilled waste by more than 3%, and that is including Massachusetts, which successfully reduced landfilled waste by 7%—gradually achieving a 13.2% reduction,” said Robert Evan Sanders, assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management and coauthor of the paper. “Essentially, the data suggest that in four out of the five states we studied, these laws did nothing to reduce waste.”
Fiorentia Anglou, coauthor of the paper, who conducted the research while earning a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business added, “With food waste around the globe contributing 8 to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, we certainly don’t think states should abandon these laws, but more action needs to be taken to make them effective.”
The authors of the paper compiled a comprehensive waste dataset covering 36 U.S. states between 1996 and 2019 to evaluate the first five implemented at the state level: California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
The researchers point to three distinctive features in the Massachusetts food waste ban law that when combined, likely help make it effective. They include:
Best composting infrastructure network. The state has the most food waste processing facilities per every 1,000 square miles in the state.
The simplest language: The law in Massachusetts is the easiest to understand, with the least number of exceptions and exemptions.
Enforcement: Massachusetts had more than triple the number of inspections per generator per year than the next nearest state, Vermont. And there was almost no enforcement—either in inspections or fines—in the other states.
The authors used a variant of the synthetic control method, which is used by economists and data scientists to evaluate government policy changes. The authors compared each state that adopted the ban to similar states that did not implement a waste ban. And they were able to project how much waste would have gone to landfills had California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts not implemented waste bans.
“With most of these laws, about 70% of commercial organic waste would have been illegal to send to landfills," said Ioannis Stamatopoulos, coauthor of the paper and associate professor at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business. “If you take all that organic waste out of landfills, it should reduce the amount of waste that's going into landfills by 10% in some cases, and that should have been something we were able to see in the data but did not."
The researchers used data fromenvironmental state agencies of in 36 states, covering the waste produced by 274 million Americans—or 85% of the U.S. population. Though some states provide the data on their websites, most of it was collected manually over the course of a year from public records requests and contacting state agencies.
“Our findings indicate that simply implementing a food waste ban is not enough to achieve significant reductions in landfill waste,” the authors note. "Massachusetts has shown that with the right combination of comprehensive coverage and effective enforcement, these bans can work. It's crucial for other states to learn from this model and adapt their policies accordingly to meet environmental targets and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
They added that California has taken a step in the right direction with the passage of SB 1383 in 2022, which requires every jurisdiction to provide organic waste collection services to all residents and businesses.
Of the first five U.S. states with food waste bans, Massachusetts alone has reduced landfill waste
Article Publication Date
12-Sep-2024
A new tack for slack: motivate workers
Managers can boost everyone’s productivity by praising successful workers in company-wide messaging
University of Texas at Austin
Workplace communications platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are sometimes accused of reducing productivity by distracting workers with constant messages and the need to respond to them.
But new research by Wen Wen, associate professor of information, risk, and operations management (IROM) at Texas McCombs, shows that companies can use them to do the opposite: to motivate workers.
How? By praising successful employees in all-staff channels that everyone can see — especially when they can’t see one another face-to-face.
“One important challenge faced by many companies is how to motivate remote workers and keep them productive,” says Wen. “Our research gives practical advice on how to construct the right messages regarding peers and how to share them on digital platforms in order to achieve a significant productivity gain.”
Power of Praise
Wen — with fellow IROM professor Andrew Whinston of Texas McCombs, Stephen He of The University of Texas at San Antonio, and Haoyuan Liu of Nanyang Technological University — scrutinized data from a Chinese internet technology company with 340 sales employees spread across 28 branches.
Whenever a sales representative landed a deal, human resources representatives would alert all branch workers on a Slack-like app. The notes were lengthy, individualized, and garnished with emojis.
The researchers classified the messages into two types: ones that praised employees’ efforts and ones that praised employees’ abilities. How would those messages affect the performance of other employees, as measured by the number of phone calls they made to prospective subscribers?
The team found both kinds of messages boosted overall productivity.
For a 10 percentage-point increase in the intensity of messages praising efforts, other workers averaged 0.9 more calls a day.
The same amount of increase in messaging about abilities inspired other workers to make 1.2 more calls a day.
Distance Makes a Difference
But the two kinds of messages had different effects, depending on whether other employees knew personally the ones being praised. Dividing relationships into “socially close” and “socially distant,” the study found:
Effort-focused notes boosted sales calls made by both close and distant colleagues, with no significant difference between them.
Ability-focused messages had strong motivating effects on close co-workers. For distant co-workers, however, call numbers were virtually unchanged.
The researchers got similar results from a second study, which surveyed 228 U.S. workers from a variety of companies.
Why did commending effort inspire more workers than commending ability? Wen points to prior psychological research.
People relate to another’s effort because they see it as controllable, actionable, and contributing to success, she says. “Individuals often exhibit heightened dedication when they perceive that the goals they pursue are more achievable.”
It’s a different story for ability-focused messages. People who are socially close see themselves as having similar abilities, and they work harder. But those who are distant are less likely to believe that they possess similar abilities or that they can acquire them anytime soon.
That’s a particularly important finding for companies with many remote workers, Wen notes. “They usually do not know each other due to the physical distance,” she says.
“For a distributed workforce, managers should probably consider crafting effort-focused messages when sharing peer successes, instead of ability-focused messages. People can be influenced by effort-focused messages about peers whom they don’t even know.”
Peer Influence in the Workplace: Evidence from an Enterprise Digital Platform
UTA harvests first climate-smart soybean crop
USDA project aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
University of Texas at Arlington
image:
USDA Program Officer Loren Muldowney, participating farmer Courtney Moore, and principal investigator Woo-Suk Chang. The UTA climate-smart team hosted the USDA Climate-Smart Soybeans: 2024 Summer Meeting and Outreach at Embassy Suites – McAllen Convention Center on August 23, 2024.
UT Arlington biologists, working with underserved farmers in South Texas, have harvested their first crop of climate-smart soybeans. This harvest is part of a four-and-a-half-year, $5 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to test whether climate-smart agricultural practices can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) responsible for climate change—including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—while simultaneously increasing crop production.
“We are the first to harvest climate-smart soybeans in this program, in part because of the earlier growing season in South Texas,” said Woo-Suk Chang, professor of biology at UTA and principal investigator on the USDA grant. “Most people don’t realize it, but farming activities make up about 10% of GHG emissions. We’re hoping to help the agriculture industry change that.”
As part of the project, researchers from UTA, Texas A&M AgriLife, Tarleton State University, and the University of Missouri collaborated with 14 farmers across Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri to implement five climate-smart agricultural practices, including:
No-till agriculture: Conventional tillage, which typically involves intensive soil disturbance, can result in nutrient loss and the release of carbon from the ground. To positively impact soil health, the researchers are encouraging farmers to adopt no-till planting strategies to preserve carbon storage.
Cover crops: Growing different vegetation during the winter, known as cover crops, can help improve the nutrients in the soil. Soil scientists are experimenting with various cover-crop mixtures to see which ones are most effective at improving soil health.
Crop rotation: Alternating the crops grown each season can help keep nutrients in the soil and prevent erosion. Researchers are testing the best crop rotation strategies for climate-tolerant soybeans (i.e., drought-tolerant and flood-tolerant cultivars) that have been developed to handle extreme weather events.
Bio-inoculants: Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi can be introduced to the soil to help naturally fertilize it while increasing plant resistance to insects, disease, and extreme weather. Researchers in the trial are testing whether a drought-tolerant nitrogen-fixing inoculant developed by the Chang Lab can increase crop yields while reducing GHG emissions.
Biochar: Biochar is a type of black carbon produced by the partial burning of organic waste like wood chips and manure. Scientists are studying how adding biochar to the soil can help retain water and trap GHGs in the soil, preventing their release into the atmosphere. The first climate-smart soybeans were harvested from the fields where biochar had been applied. “Biochar would play a leading role in enhancing agricultural and environmental sustainability with climate change mitigation in soybean fields,” said Eunsung Kan, professor of biological and agricultural engineering at Texas A&M AgriLife.
As the rest of the farmers in the project harvest their crops this fall, the UTA climate-smart team will evaluate the reduction of GHG emissions and potential yield increases due to these agricultural practices. Additionally, they will use a portable gas analyzer to measure and monitor if the test farms were successful in reducing the levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.
Another goal of the USDA Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program is to develop a market for these products. If this and other pilot projects growing climate-smart commodities prove successful, the next step will involve creating a market through outreach and advertising for climate-smart agricultural products. The UTA team has been collaborating with Texas Valley Grain to establish a climate-smart market in South Texas, with the potential to export these products to Mexico.
“Just as consumers are willing to pay extra for organically grown products, we hope to create a marketplace where they will have a choice to support underserved farmers whose practices help reduce GHG emissions,” said Andrew Scott, an agricultural consultant and soybean expert in South Texas. “We’re already seeing this trend in the energy market where consumers have a choice to select plans where much of the electricity comes from wind or solar. Our goal is to offer a similar choice when it comes to purchasing commodities.”
Over two-million acres of floodplain development occurred in U.S. in last two decades, study finds
Roughly half of all residential floodplain development in U.S. was built in Florida
University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
Credit: Armen Agopian, University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science
A nationwide analysis of community-level floodplain development found that over two-million acres of floodplain were developed over the past two decades across the United States, with roughly half of all new floodplain housing built in Florida.
These findings from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science provide new information on patterns of floodplain development that pose a potential risk to people and communities in regions like the Southeastern U.S. that are especially prone to flooding.
In the new study, researchers combined geospatial land use, impervious surface, and housing data with information from digitized regulatory floodplain maps to measure new floodplain development for communities across the U.S. The analysis, published in the journal Earth’s Future, found that over 840,000 new residential properties were built in the floodplain across the U.S. with about 398,000 of those built in Florida, which represents 21 percent of all new housing built in the state and the highest total of any U.S. state.
“Given the size of floodplains and amount of new overall housing growth, those figures are actually much less than we would expect,” said the study’s lead author Armen Agopian, a Ph.D. student in the Abess graduate program at the Rosenstiel School.
The researchers note that if new housing was distributed proportionally to the share of floodplain land in Florida, they would expect to see 40% of new housing built in the floodplain.
They also found that 74 percent of communities across the United States have limited new development in floodplains, and 87 percent have limited new housing in floodplains through local government regulations and practices. The analysis also found that coastal communities are more likely to concentrate new development and housing in floodplains as compared to inland communities.
The study revealed that communities that participate in FEMA’s Community Rating System, a voluntary incentive program that rewards communities that adopt certain practices with discounted flood insurance rates, were found to have a higher likelihood of floodplain development.
“Communities with a flood problem enroll in the program, but participating alone isn’t enough to support safer development patterns. Instead, communities need both to participate and to improve their floodplain management practices—those are the ones that start to limit floodplain development,” said Agopian.
Development in flood-prone areas is a major driver of increases in flood-related damage, increasing both the likelihood that a flood will impact people and infrastructure and the severity of harm when it does.
This study is the first comprehensive dataset measuring floodplain development outcomes, community by community, nationwide. To date, most research on flood damage and actions has focused on the places that have experienced big floods with homes destroyed or lives lost.
“What we find is that many communities around the nation have taken smart action early on, avoiding development in their floodplains from the start. There’s a lot we can learn from these communities that are often with little fanfare avoiding flood problems from the start,” said senior author of the study Katharine Mach, professor and chair of the Rosenstiel School Department of Environmental Science and Policy.
The study was supported by National Science Foundation grants (# 2034308, # 2034239 and # 2033929), the Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, and the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.
About the University of Miami and Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science
The University of Miami is a private research university and academic health system with a distinct geographic capacity to connect institutions, individuals, and ideas across the hemisphere and around the world. The University’s vibrant and diverse academic community comprises 12 schools and colleges serving more than 19,000 undergraduate and graduate students in more than 180 majors and programs. Located within one of the most dynamic and multicultural cities in the world, the University is building new bridges across geographic, cultural, and intellectual borders, bringing a passion for scholarly excellence, a spirit of innovation, a respect for including and elevating diverse voices, and a commitment to tackling the challenges facing our world. With more than $413 million in research and sponsored program expenditures annually, the University of Miami is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU).
Founded in 1943, the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science is one of the world’s premier research institutions in the continental United States. The School’s basic and applied research programs seek to improve understanding and prediction of Earth’s geological, oceanic, and atmospheric systems by focusing on four key pillars:
*Saving lives through better forecasting of extreme weather and seismic events.
*Feeding the world by developing sustainable wild fisheries and aquaculture programs.
*Unlocking ocean secrets through research on climate, weather, energy and medicine.
*Preserving marine species, including endangered sharks and other fish, as well as protecting and restoring threatened coral reefs. www.earth.miami.edu.
Climate change and asteroids are linked with animal origin and extinction – and plate tectonics also seems to play a key evolutionary role, ‘groundbreaking’ new fossil research reveals.
The discovery of an exceptionally well preserved ancient primitive Devonian coelacanth fish in remote Western Australia has been linked to a period of heightened tectonic activity, or movement in the Earth’s crust, according to the new study in NatureCommunications. (Open access when published)
Led by Flinders University and experts from Canada, Australia and Europe, the new fossil from the Gogo Formation in WA, named Ngamugawi wirngarri, also helps to fill in an important transition period in coelacanth history, between the most primitive forms and other more ‘anatomically-modern’ forms.
“We are thrilled to work with people of the Mimbi community to grace this beautiful new fish with the first name taken from the Gooniyandi language,” says first author Dr Alice Clement, an evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist from Flinders University.
“Our analyses found that tectonic plate activity had a profound influence on rates of coelacanth evolution. Namely that new species of coelacanth were more likely to evolve during periods of heightened tectonic activity as new habitats were divided and created,” she says.
The study confirms the Late Devonian Gogo Formation as one of the richest and best-preserved assemblages of fossil fishes and invertebrates on Earth.
Flinders University Strategic Professor of Palaeontology John Long says the fossil, dating from the Devonian Period (359-419 million years ago), “provides us with some great insight into the early anatomy of this lineage that eventually led to humans”.
“For more than 35 years, we have found several perfectly preserved 3D fish fossils from Gogo sites which have yielded many significant discoveries, including mineralised soft tissues and the origins of complex sexual reproduction in vertebrates,” says Professor Long.
“Our study of this new species led us to analyse the evolutionary history of all known coelacanths.”
Many parts of human anatomy originated in the Early Palaeozoic (540-350 million years ago). This was when jaws, teeth, paired appendages, ossified brain-cases, intromittent genital organs, chambered hearts and paired lungs all appeared in early fishes.
“While now covered in dry rocky outcrops, the Gogo Formation on Gooniyandi Country in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia was part of an ancient tropical reef teeming with more than 50 species of fish about 380 million years ago.
“We calculated the rates of evolution across their 410 million-year history. This revealed that coelacanth evolution has slowed down drastically since the time of the dinosaurs, but with a few intriguing exceptions.”
Today, the coelacanth is a fascinating deep-sea fish that lives off the coasts of eastern Africa and Indonesia and can reach up to 2m in length. They are "lobe-finned" fish, which means they have robust bones in their fins not too dissimilar to the bones in our own arms, and are thus considered to be more closely related to lungfish and tetrapods (the back-boned animals with arms and legs such as frogs, emus and mice) than most other fishes.
Over the past 410 million years, more than more than 175 species of coelacanths have been discovered across the globe. During the Mesozoic Era, the age of dinosaurs, coelacanths diversified significantly, with some species developing unusual body shapes. However, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, around 66 million years ago, they mysteriously disappeared from the fossil record.
The end Cretaceous extinction, sparked by the impact from a massive asteroid, wiped out approximately 75% of all life on Earth, including all of the non-avian (bird-like) dinosaurs. Thus, it was presumed that the coelacanth fishes had been swept up as a casualty of the same mass extinction event.
But in 1938, people fishing off South Africa pulled up a large mysterious looking fish from the ocean depths, with the ‘lazarus’ fish going on to gain cult status in the world of biological evolution.
Another senior co-author, vertebrate palaeontologist Professor Richard Cloutier, from the University of Quebec in Rimouski (UQAR), says the new Nature Communications study challenges the idea that surviving coelacanths are the oldest ‘living fossils’.
“They first appear in the geological record more than 410 million years ago, with fragmentary fossils known from places like China and Australia. However, most of the early forms remain poorly known, making Ngamugawi wirngarri the best known Devonian coealacanth.
“As we slowly fill in the gaps, we can start to understand how living coelacanth species of Latimeria, which commonly are considered to be ‘living fossils,’ actually are continuing to evolve and might not deserve such an enigmatic title,” says Professor Cloutier, a previous honorary visiting scholar at Flinders University.
The study’s coauthors have affiliations with Mahasarakham University in Thailand, the South Australian Museum, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, University of Bristol, Curtin University in Western Australia and the WA Museum.
Acknowledgements: The fieldwork was funded by Australian Research Council DP grants. Prof Cloutier also received funding from the NERC and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Thanks to the Gooniyandi people, including Rosemary Nuggett, Elder from the Mimbi Caves Community, and other landholders on which the Gogo fish sites are located.
Professor John Long holding a fossil specimen. Photo courtesy: Flinders University
Credit
Flinders University
Ngamugawi wirngarri coelacanth skull bones after they were acid etched out of rock at Museum Victoria, 2009.
Credit
J Long (Flinders University)
Flinders University vertebrate palaeontologist Dr Alice Clement looking at a model of a modern-day coelacanth and a 3D printed skull of the Ngamugawi wirngarri coelacanth.
A new study finds that a trilobite species with exceptionally well-preserved fossils from upstate New York has an additional set of legs underneath its head. The research, led by the American Museum of Natural History and Nanjing University in China, suggests that having a fifth pair of head appendages might be more widespread among trilobites than once thought. Published today in the journal Palaeontology, the study helps researchers better understand how trilobite heads are segmented.
Trilobites are a group of extinct arthropods whose living relatives include lobsters and spiders. Like other arthropods, the bodies of trilobites are made up of many segments, with the head region comprised of several fused segments. As with other parts of the trilobite body (the thorax and tail), these segments were associated with appendages, which ranged in function from sensing to feeding to locomotion.
“The number of these segments and how they are associated with other important traits, like eyes and legs, is important for understanding how arthropods are related to one another, and therefore, how they evolved,” said Melanie Hopkins, curator and chair of the Museum’s Division of Paleontology.
The segments in the trilobite head can be counted in two different ways: by looking at the grooves (called furrows) on the upper side of the trilobite fossil’s hard exoskeleton, or by counting the pairs of preserved antennae and legs on the underside of the fossil. The soft appendages of trilobites are rarely preserved, though, and when looking at the segments in the trilobite head, researchers regularly find a mismatch between these two methods.
In the new study, Hopkins and colleague Jin-Bo Hou from Nanjing University examined newly recovered specimens of the exceptionally preserved trilobite Triarthrus eatoni from upstate New York. These fossils, known for the gold shine of the pyrite replacement preserving them, show an additional, previously undescribed leg underneath the head.
“This fantastic preservation style allows us to observe 3D appendages in hundreds of specimens directly from the ventral side of the animals, just like looking at the appendages of horseshoe crabs on a beach by grabbing them and turning them upside down,” said Hou.
By making comparisons with another trilobite species, the exceptionally preserved Olenoides serratus from the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Hopkins and Hou propose a model for how appendages were attached to the head in relation to the grooves in the exoskeleton. This model resolves the apparent mismatch and indicates that the trilobite head included six segments: an anterior segment associated with the developmental origin of the eyes and five additional segments, associated with one pair of antennae and four pairs of walking legs, respectively.
This study expands on the analysis that Hou and Hopkins have done on Triarthrus eatoni, whichshowed that the walking legs carry micron-sized respiratory structures (gills) and that the function of some of the spines on the walking legs was to keep these gills clean.
Paper DOI: 10.1111/pala.12723
Coauthor Melanie Hopkins with a well-preserved fossil of Triarthrus eatoni from upstate New York.
An extremely well-preserved fossil of Triarthrus eatoni from upstate New York (on right)
ABOUT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY (AMNH)
The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869 with a dual mission of scientific research and science education, is one of the world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses more than 40 permanent exhibition halls, galleries for temporary exhibitions, the Rose Center for Earth and Space including the Hayden Planetarium, and the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The Museum’s scientists draw on a world-class permanent collection of more than 30 million specimens and artifacts, some of which are billions of years old, and on one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Museum offers two of the only free-standing, degree-granting programs of their kind at any museum in the U.S.: the Ph.D. program in Comparative Biology and the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Earth Science residency program. Visit amnh.org for more information.
