What if pieces of plastic strewn across the world’s beaches ended up in brand new computer boxes, not floating in the middle of the ocean or lodged inside seabirds?

That’s what computer company Dell has set out to do, testing a supply chain that sees litter picked up from Haiti’s beaches and worked into recycled packaging.

Anyone now buying the XPS 13 2-in-1 laptop can expect to find the machine sitting on a tray that’s 25 per cent ocean plastic – complete with an image of a whale and a link that leads to information about marine litter.

float in the world’s oceans, breaking into smaller pieces and or that get entangled in bags or eat pieces with sharp edges.

Dell estimates that its programme, a first for the industry, will take around 8000 kilograms of plastic out of oceans this year.

Tons of plastic

“We’ll be using 8 tonnes of ocean plastics, and we will be scaling in the coming years,” says Louise Koch, Dell’s corporate sustainability lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who presented the initiative at last week’s in Helsinki, Finland.

of plastic litter dumped on land enters the oceans each year, estimated to amount to between 4 million and 12 million metric tons in 2010.

The UN, which last week held its , has . But not everyone is convinced it will make a real difference.

“Most marine debris does not reach the oceans via beaches,” says Emma Priestland, marine litter policy officer at the NGO Seas at Risk. It gets in mainly through rivers, landfills near the coast, or the shipping and fishing industry, she says.

“What is on those beaches has most likely been washed up there,” says Priestland. “Recycling it will be difficult and energy-intensive.”

Mine Banu Tekman at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, agrees that the impact is likely to be small, but says it is a great initiative for raising awareness.

It will take a large number of companies getting involved in this type of recycling to see a benefit for the environment, says Francois Galgani, an expert on plastics pollution at French institute IFREMER.

Cleaning up the beaches

Koch admits that Dell has yet to measure how energy-efficient the process is, but says the carbon footprint is bound to be smaller than using virgin plastics. And stopping plastics from washing into the ocean can make a difference, she says.

According to the US , cleaning up beaches helps cut down on the tiny pieces floating in oceans, because it plugs one big source of ocean pollution.

Dell makes sure that the plastic coming from Haiti is properly sorted so it’s the right quality and does not contain toxic substances. It does this by collaborating with informal workers who already make a living by sorting through waste and selling it to local middlemen.

“We work with them and train them on how to distinguish between different kinds of plastics,” Koch says. “So we are actually contributing to creating jobs, which I think is fantastic.”

But creating jobs risks perpetuating the problem, according to Ann Dom, deputy director of Seas at Risk. Despite Dell’s good intentions, she argues that the focus should be on avoiding the use of plastic in the first place. This can be done, she says, by promoting a circular economy with products that are designed in an eco-friendly and resource-efficient way, and are repairable and shareable, without the need for wasteful packaging.

Climate change is already harming around 700 species of mammals and birds. That means that warming is not just a theoretical future threat, and conservation work must focus on the “here and now”, says a new study.

It reviewed 136 studies published between 1990 and 2015, as well as modelling the risks to animals on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It concluded that almost half of terrestrial mammal species and nearly a quarter of all bird species could already be negatively affected, without us even realising.

“We have the knowledge to take action,” says Lee Hannah, a conservation ecologist and senior researcher at Conservation International, a non-profit based in Arlington, Virginia. “Truly massive climate-triggered insect outbreaks have killed millions of trees in North America. Heat flashes in the oceans have killed corals and changed coral reefs in every ocean.”

A third of all species may be at risk of extinction, says Hannah, and the study shows the changes are happening already.

Lead author Michela Pacifici at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, says their results also show the most affected species are in highly developed areas or areas expecting a human population boom in coming decades. So conservation needs to focus more on monitoring in these locations and on “control of human demand for natural resources”, she says.

Risk assessment

The team assessed the risk to animals by looking at traits including body mass, population numbers, geographic range, reproductive rate and survival rate. If at least one of these shows a decline affecting half the animal population or more, they reasoned, it shows climate change is already taking its toll.

Applying their model, they estimated that 47 per cent of 873 species of threatened terrestrial mammals and 23.4 per cent of 1272 threatened bird species are showing signs of harm. Elephants, primates and marsupials are the most affected.

The reasons why species are affected vary. Some mammals are struggling to adapt as temperatures are changing too fast or because their diets are specialised. For some birds, living at high altitude means fewer opportunities to move to cooler areas, while seabirds and others that live close to water face fragmented habitats or algal blooms.

Some 92 per cent of existing data on species vulnerabilities that the study reviewed came from Europe and North America. Hannah says we can expect the tropics to be even more climate-sensitive, with massive changes already under way.

For a shy animal like the Cyprus mouflon, deserted land is a boon. The wild ancestor of domesticated sheep is one of several species flourishing in a 180-kilometre-strip of largely abandoned land that runs east to west along the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

This “buffer zone”, administered by the UN, has been an eerie ecological safe haven for over 40 years, since a conflict split the island along Greek and Turkish ethnic lines in 1974.

Peace talks underway this week to broker a solution, backed by the UK and US, have been hailed as the closest the two sides have been to an agreement. Success is set to pit the welfare of rare native wildlife against a long-burning desire of local people to reclaim lost land.

A found only in Cyprus, the Cyprus has thrived in the zone, contributing to a rise in numbers helped by protection measures in place since the 1930s. But this progress is fragile. There are under 3000 mouflon on the island after a recent decline in numbers.

A biodiversity survey by a joint team of Greek and Turkish Cypriot scientists in 2007 found larger numbers of mouflon inside than outside the zone, mostly in the abandoned village of Variseia. It also found 18 mammal and 358 plant species, 13 of which are endemic to the island.

Rare plants

A by Frederick University in Cyprus found the rare Cyprus tulip (Tulipa cypria) and Cyprus Bee Orchid (Ophrys kotschyi). Also recorded were vulnerable birds such as the Eurasian stone curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus) and the Northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus).

, who led , says it isn’t borders that help ecosystems regenerate, but the absence of human activity. Currently interference is minimal, aside from fenced off minefields and a few homes, farming areas and movements by UN peacekeeping forces.

Reunification could make a difference, Jarraud says, because on a small island with a million inhabitants, loss of habitat is one of the biggest biodiversity threats.

“Redevelopment of the buffer zone should take into account the risk of even further losing the habitat of species already endangered,” says Jarraud.

According to a government source, to minimise negative impacts under a reunification deal wildlife protection should be put under federal jurisdiction, and not be left to the constituent states. But either way, he says, planning protected areas under a united island will be an advantage.

NGOs have proposed the zone should become a protected national . But the concerns of people eager to return to their land after decades of displacement can’t be ignored, and discussions should be participatory, Jarraud stresses. “You have to respect people’s rights to get back to their homes.”

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