Just as noise pollution negatively impacts human health, it also affects wildlife. It can affect animal communication, their abilities to find food and impact where they live. A recent study published in Biology Letters found that human-created noise is affecting a wide range of animals. Noise pollution is caused by cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, factories, industrial activities and sounds from cities, among others. Researchers found that wildlife in many different land and water ecosystems showed significant responses to human-created noise.

For example, bats use ultrasonic sound waves to get around and to find food. However, noise pollution affects this and causes them to spend more time and energy locating their food source. Shipping lanes in the UK can be deafening to harbor seals, and noises from ships are seriously impacting killer whales ability to find food and avoid potential dangers, according to episode 2 of CBC s Killers: J pod on the brink (边缘). And it’s no secret that many human-created conditions, like noise, are changing the behavior of birds. You may be surprised to learn that plants are also impacted, since pollinators (传粉昆虫) often relocate to quieter areas.

Not unlike the impact of light pollution on insects, noise pollution is causing change. It can change the types of species living in many different ecosystems, which in turn impacts the functions of these areas, according to The Guardian.

The good news is that if noise is reduced or simply turned off, it more or less removes the issue. The impact does not remain in the same way as other forms of pollution, like plastic or chemicals. And efforts are already underway in Canada.

BC Ferries is working to lessen the effects of underwater noise, especially along ferry routes that pass through critical habitats. WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) Canada is encouraging the federal government to increase protective measures in the Arctic. They’re also working with international colleagues to address the increase of noise in the region as a result of new shipping routes.

While these initiatives demonstrate progress, tightening rules and regulations around noise pollution is an important measure for conserving wildlife in Canada.

It feels good to recycle. There’s a certain sense of accomplishment that comes from carefully sorting soda bottles, plastic bags and yogurt cups from the rest of the garbage. The more plastic you put in that blue bin, the more you’re keeping out of landfills and the oceans, right?

Wrong. No matter how meticulous you are in cleaning and separating your plastics, most end up in the trash anyway. Take flexible food packages. Those films contain several layers of different plastics. Because each plastic has to be recycled separately, those films are not recyclable. The polypropylene (聚丙烯) in yogurt cups and other items doesn’t usually get recycled either; recycling a hodgepodge of polypropylene produces a dark, smelly plastic that few manufacturers will use.

Only two kinds of plastic are commonly recycled in the United States: the kind in plastic soda bottles, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET; and the plastic found in milk containers — high-density polyethylene, or HDPE. Together, those plastics make up only about a quarter of the world’s plastic trash. And when those plastics are recycled, they aren’t good for much. Melting plastic down to recycle changes its consistency, so PET from bottles has to be mixed with brand-new plastic to make a sturdy final product. Recycling a mix of multicolored HDPE pieces creates a dark plastic good only for making products like park benches and waste bins, in which properties like color don’t matter much.

The difficulties of recycling plastic into anything manufacturers want to use is a big reason why the world is littered with so much plastic waste, says Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2018 alone, the United States landfilled 27 million tons of plastic and recycled a mere 3 million, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Low recycling rates aren’t just a problem in the United States. Of the 6.3 billion tons of plastic that have been discarded around the world, only about 9 percent has gotten recycled. Another 12 percent has been burned, and almost 80 percent has piled up on land or in waterways.