Asia Pacific Academy of Science Pte. Ltd. (APACSCI) specializes in international journal publishing. APACSCI adopts the open access publishing model and provides an important communication bridge for academic groups whose interest fields include engineering, technology, medicine, computer, mathematics, agriculture and forestry, and environment.
The (partial) replacement of synthetic polymers with bioplastics is due to increased production of conventional packaging plastics causing for severe environmental pollution with plastics waste. The bioplastics, however, represent complex mixtures of known and unknown (bio)polymers, fillers, plasticizers, stabilizers, flame retardant, pigments, antioxidants, hydrophobic polymers such as poly(lactic acid), polyethylene, polyesters, glycol, or poly(butylene succinate), and little is known of their chemical safety for both the environment and the human health. Polymerization reactions of bioplastics can produce no intentionally added chemicals to the bulk material, which could be toxic, as well. When polymers are used to food packing, then the latter chemicals could also migrate from the polymer to food. This fact compromises the safety for consumers, as well. The scarce data on chemical safety of bioplastics makes a gap in knowledge of their toxicity to humans and environment. Thus, development of exact analytical protocols for determining chemicals of bioplastics in environmental and food samples as well as packing polymers can only provide warrant for reliable conclusive evidence of their safety for both the human health and the environment. The task is compulsory according to legislation Directives valid to environmental protection, food control, and assessment of the risk to human health. The quantitative and structural determination of analytes is primary research task of analysis of polymers. The methods of mass spectrometry are fruitfully used for these purposes. Methodological development of exact analytical mass spectrometric tools for reliable structural analysis of bioplastics only guarantees their safety, efficacy, and quality to both humans and environment. This study, first, highlights innovative stochastic dynamics equations processing exactly mass spectrometric measurands and, thus, producing exact analyte quantification and 3D molecular and electronic structural analyses. There are determined synthetic polymers such as poly(ethylenglycol), poly(propylene glycol), and polyisoprene as well as biopolymers in bags for foodstuffs made from renewable cellulose and starch, and containing, in total within the 20,416–17,495 chemicals per sample of the composite biopolymers. Advantages of complementary employment in mass spectrometric methods and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy is highlighted. The study utilizes ultra-high resolution electrospray ionization mass spectrometric and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic data on biodegradable plastics bags for foodstuffs; high accuracy quantum chemical static methods, molecular dynamics; and chemometrics. There is achieved method performance |r| = 0.99981 determining poly(propylene glycol) in bag for foodstuff containing 20,416 species and using stochastic dynamics mass spectrometric formulas. The results highlight their great capability and applicability to the analytical science as well as relevance to both the fundamental research and to the industry.
Environmental injustice in journalism: Analysis of pesticide pollution reporting
Vol 4, Issue 2, 2023
Issue release: 12 December 2023
VIEWS - 7776 (Abstract)
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Abstract
The objective of this paper is to discuss the approach of the journalism on the use of pesticides as a situation that generates environmental injustice. To make such reflection, we rely on the series of Zero Hora reports published in December 2016 on the contamination of Ceasa products, in Porto Alegre, by pesticides banned in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) or used above the limit set by law. We start from Acselrad’s (2010) conception of environmental justice. This is a notion that refers to socio-political dynamics, since it includes conflicts arising from the violation of the rights of human communities due to unsustainable use of the environment. To assess the impact of injustices in the media, we resorted to the assumptions of Environmental Journalism, a perspective that defends the mobilizing function of journalism based on a complex view of the phenomena (Girardi et al., 2012) from a descriptive and qualitative analysis (Martins, 2001). Among the results, it is noted that the series does not incorporate a systemic view of the problem, ignoring the impacts of pesticides on the entire production chain and ecosystems.
Keywords
References
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Prof. Hongxing Dai
Beijing University of Technology, China
