It’s estimated that every 2,6 seconds, a new chemical substance is isolated or synthesized (ScienceBlog 2009), adding to the nearly 200 million identified chemical substances in the world (American Chemical Society 2022). While many of these are essential for society and not harmful to the environment, one effect of this proliferation of chemicals in our everyday lives has been the increase of polluted environments with multiple contaminants. Electronic waste sites are an example of this, where pollution can be derived from heavy metals, organic pollutants, and plastic particles, among others. Together with other human sources, such as mining waste, oil pollution, air pollution, and microplastics, we have in our hands an eco-social problem. A global, ongoing, and growing issue that merges natural and societal aspects (Leung, Cheung, and Wong 2015; Miettinen et al. 2019; Parikka 2015; Zhang et al. 2019). But first, a bit of context.

If you have never come across this term, eco-social refers to the interconnection between the social and the environmental. From how we travel and commute to the environmental consequences of the food we buy as a society or the way our gut microbiome can influence our mood and health, the environmental and social are intertwined in many ways and not easily separated. My interest and inclination to study the eco-social is in part due to the emergence of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch that includes our current lived reality. This concept has several definitions and durations but roughly describes the period in which human impacts have not just altered Earth systems but have also become an “environmental force” with lasting effects (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2018). It is important to know that the Anthropocene is a concept that can be used with several meanings, which can sometimes lead to some confusion and contradiction. In my research, I examine anthropogenic (man-made) pollution from the perspective of two of the most common definitions: a period in which humans have shaped Earth’s climatic and environmental workings and as the end of the division between society and nature (Bauer and Ellis 2018). 

My research topic focuses on nature-based solutions to anthropogenic pollution, such as bioremediation, a method that uses plants and microbes to degrade and sequester (i.e., to store) toxins. Other methods used to clean up pollution often require heavy machinery to move soil off-site, which is both resource-intensive and not very sustainable. Bioremediation, on the other hand, uses pollution-tolerant species of plants and microbes such as bacteria and fungi to degrade or sequester heavy metals (such as lead, arsenic, and cadmium) and organic compounds (such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers from flame retardants and polychlorinated biphenyls from electrical lubricants and coolants). Bacteria and fungi can also act as plant growth-promoters, enhancing the process. But bioremediation requires giving up (some) control of the procedure to microbes and plants. Thus, what do ‘nature-based solutions’, based on natural processes and using natural organisms, mean for how we think of and approach polluted environments? How sustainable and effective are these methods in a world of “permanent pollution” (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018)? What potential futures do remediated spaces hold, and what are the afterlives of the plants and microbes within them? 

To answer some of these questions, I visit field sites and interview bioremediation scientists in China and Finland. China is where electronic waste has been an environmental issue for decades and where bioremediation has been used in the past ten years or so in sites contaminated by electronic waste dismantling. The waste was originally sourced globally from different material sources before being manufactured (most likely also in China) and sold as a commodity around the world, returning to the country as scrap waste. Although China has now banned imports from abroad, it must still deal with its own domestic electronic waste, a burdensome problem for a country of over 1 billion people (Ng 2019; Ng forthcoming a; Ng forthcoming b). Bioremediation is also used in Finland on mining sites, oil spills, and water treatment. In both cases, my focus is on the potentialities of microbes as non-human “solutions” to pollution. To explore what their adaptive potential illustrates about life amongst pollution as well as life after pollution and life as altered by pollution (Ng forthcoming a), I ask scientists about their thoughts on microbial adaptation to difficult environments. Do they believe that polluted sites can be completely cleaned? Is pollution everywhere and permanent? What does the environment become when altered and transformed by anthropogenic pollution?

Their answers can vary greatly, but there is a general agreement that pollution, if left unchecked, poses significant, long-term harm to our ecosystems. There are roughly 8 million known commercial chemicals, but ecotoxicological (i.e., the study of toxins on organisms and the environment) data is only available for less than 100,000 of them (Machado, Wood, and Kloas 2019). That is, we only know the toxic effects on living organisms of 1,25% of all commercial chemicals. Another thing that stands out to scientists is the capacity of microbes to surprise us with what they can do. Some scientists have told me about, for example, the versatility of microbes and their incredible capacity to adapt and survive in just about any environment, from deep-sea seeps or the Arctic cold to toxic, human-polluted environments. They have pointed out that microbes like bacteria are the most primitive form of life, but due to their diversity and adaptability, they can be used to solve many human-made problems, such as removing heavy metals like arsenic from mine waste (Kujala et al. 2020), to filtering excess nutrients like nitrogen from agriculture (Yrjälä and Lopez-Echartea 2021; Yrjälä et al. 2022), and removing contaminants from waste and stormwaters (Kiani et al. 2021), among others!.

I am a social scientist, but for much of my academic career, I have been interested in and concerned with the environment. Unseen things like chemical pollutants and microbes impact us in our everyday lives, and in turn, our personal and collective choices and actions affect their proliferation and impact on the environment. My aim is to spread knowledge about the current reality, where we, as humans, are influencing earth systems in manifold ways. I try to explore these human impacts and alterations on soil organisms to highlight the interconnection of environmental and social realms and to provoke further thinking on what life is found in polluted and post-polluted, Anthropocenic spaces. How non-human species adapt to anthropogenic pollution has implications for how and what kind of human and non-human life will find a way out of highly polluted environments. Some microbes will be able to survive it, but what about the rest of us? 

REFERENCES

Bauer, Andrew M. and Ellis, Erle C. (2018) The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring Understanding of Social-Environmental Change. Current Anthropology 59(2): 209-227.

American Chemical Society (CAS) (2022). CAS REGISTRY®. Accessed June 1, 2022. https://www.cas.org/cas-data/cas-registry 

Crutzen, P. J. (2002) Geology of mankind. Nature 415. DOI: 10.1038/415023a.

Kiani, Sepideh, Kujala, Katharina Pulkkinen, Jani T., Aalto, Sanni L. Suurnäkki, Suvi Kiuru, Tapio Tiirola, Marja, Kløve, Bjørn, and Anna-Kaisa Ronkanen (2020) Enhanced nitrogen removal of low carbon wastewater in denitrification bioreactors by utilizing industrial waste toward circular economy. Journal of Cleaner Production 254: 119973 DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.119973 

Kujala, Katharina, Besold, Johannes, Mikkonen, Anu, Tiirola, Marja, and Britta Planer-Friedrich (2020) Abundant and diverse arsenic-metabolizing microorganisms in peatlands treating arsenic-contaminated mining wastewaters. Environmental microbiology 22(4): 1572-1587. DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.14922

Leung, Anna O.W., Kwai Chung Cheung, and Ming Hung Wong (2015) Spatial distribution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in soil, sediment, and combusted residue at an e-waste processing site in southeast China. Environmental Science and Pollution Research 22: 8786-8801.

Liboiron, Max, Tironi, Manuel, and Calvillo, Nerea (2018) Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world. Social Studies of Science 48(3): 331-349. 

Machado, Anderson Abel de Souza, Wood, Chris M., and Klaus, Werner (2019) Novel Concepts for Novel Entities: Updating Ecotoxicology for a Sustainable Anthropocene. Environmental Science & Technology 53: 4680-4682. 

Miettinen, Hanna, Bomberg, Malin, Nyyssönen, Mari, Reunamo, Anna, Jorgensen, Kirsten S., and Minna Vikman (2019) Oil degradation potential of microbial communities in water and sediment of Baltic Sea costal area. PLoS ONE 14(7): e0218834. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218834 

Ng, Alicia (2019) Hidden in Plain-Sight: Object-Oriented Ontology and the Hyperobject of Electronic Waste. Master’s thesis. University of Helsinki. 

—–  (forthcoming) Transforming Toxic Materialities: Microbes in Anthropogenically Polluted Soils. Theory, Culture & Society. 

—–  (forthcoming) Polluted Histories, Clean Futures? Opposing Scenarios for an Electronic Waste Circular Economy in China. In Iris Borowy and Viktor Pal (eds) How to Live with Waste: Contemporary Cultural Perspectives on Discards in the Asia-Pacific Region. Routledge. 

Parikka, Jussi (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. 

ScienceBlog (2009) 50 Millionth Unique Chemical Substance Recorded in CAS Registry. September 10, 2009. Accessed June 7, 2022. https://scienceblog.com/25034/50-millionth-unique-chemical-substance-recorded-in-cas-registry/

Steffen, W., Crutzen, P.J., and McNeill, J.R. (2007) The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36: 614-621. 

Steffen, Will, Rockström, Johan, Richardson, Katherine, Lenton, Timothy M., Folke, Carol, Liverman, Diana, Summerhayes, Colin P., Barnosky, Anthony D., Cornell, Sarah E., Crucifix, Michel, Donges, Jonathan F. (2018) Trajectories of the Earth system in the Anthropocene. PNAS 115, 8252–8259. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Yrjälä, Kim and Eglantina Lopez-Echartea (2021) Structure and function of biochar in remediation and as carrier of microbes. InAjit K. Sarmah (ed.) Advances in Chemical Pollution, Environmental Management and Protection. New York: Academic Press. 

Yrjälä, Kim, Ramakrishnan, Muthusamy, and Esko Salo (2022) Agricultural waste streams as resource in circular economy for biochar production towards carbon neutrality. Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health 26: 100339. DOI: 10.1016/j.coesh.2022.100339

Zhang, Mengjun, Yanran Zhao, Xiao Qin, Weiqian Jia, Liwei Chai, Muke Huang, and Yi Huang (2019) Microplastics from mulching film is a distinct habitat for bacteria in farmland soil. Science of the Total Environment 688: 470-478.