Rapidly rising levels of TFA, a class of “forever chemical” thought to damage fertility and child development, are being found in drinking water, blood and rain, causing alarm among experts.

TFA, or trifluoroacetic acid, is a type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS), a group of human-made chemicals used widely in consumer products that do not break down for thousands of years. Many of the substances have been linked to negative effects on human health.

Studies from across the world are reporting sharp rises in TFA. A major source is F-gases, which were brought in to replace ozone-depleting CFCs in refrigeration, air conditioning, aerosol sprays and heat pumps. Pesticides, dyes and pharmaceuticals can also be sources.

“Everywhere you look it’s increasing. There’s no study where the concentration of TFA hasn’t increased,” said David Behringer, an environmental consultant who has studied TFA in rain for the German government.

“If you’re drinking water, you’re drinking a lot of TFA, wherever you are in the world … China had a 17-fold increase of TFA in surface waters in a decade, the US had a sixfold increase in 23 years.” TFA in rainwater in Germany has been found to have increased fivefold in two decades.

“I’m worried about this because we’ve never seen in recent history a chemical that’s accumulating in so many media at such a high rate,” said Hans Peter Arp from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “It’s accumulating in our tap water, the food we’re eating, plants, trees, the sea, and all in the past few decades.”

He added: “We all have been experiencing rising TFA concentrations in our blood since the Montreal protocol [banned CFCs]. Future generations will have increasing concentrations in their blood until some kind of global action is taken. Accumulation [in the environment] is essentially irreversible and I’m afraid the impact on humans and the environment won’t be recognised by scientists until it is too late.”

Last month, the German chemical regulator informed the European Chemicals Agency that it wanted TFA classified as reprotoxic, meaning it can harm human reproductive function, fertility and foetal development.

Denmark and Germany have set limits for TFA in drinking water but the UK has not. England’s water companies have been asked to assess their drinking water sources for 47 types of PFAS but TFA is not on the list.

Britain’s Health and Safety Executive has identified TFA as “a substance of concern, since there are indications that it might cause developmental toxicity” and the Environment Agency says it is planning a targeted programme to test for TFA in surface and groundwater.

A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said it would continue to “assess levels of PFAS occurring in the environment, their sources, potential risks and to inform policy and regulatory approaches.

“Regulations require that drinking water must not contain any substance at a level which would constitute a potential danger to human health. Should TFA be detected in drinking water we would expect companies to react in the same way as for other PFAS compounds.”

But TFA is incredibly difficult to remove from water. “There’s no way to get TFA out,” said Behringer. “Reverse osmosis is massively expensive and not scalable, so the logical course is to stop the input.”

The European Fluorocarbons Technical Committee, representing the F-gas and chemicals industry, says TFA occurs naturally in large quantities in the environment. It says industrial use of TFA is limited and environmental releases are very low. It did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.

But these assertions have been disputed. The US Environmental Protection Agency says TFAs are a breakdown product of F-gases. Moreover, studies of Arctic ice cores show TFA levels have been rising sharply since F-gases replaced CFCs in the 1990s.

“Every time the industry says it’s natural, they quote certain scientific papers,” says Prof Shira Jourdan, an environmental analytical chemist at the University of Alberta. She said she had studied these decades-old papers and found they only suggested it was possible that TFA was naturally occurring because of a lack of knowledge of its origins at the time of the studies.

“None of the evidence says it’s natural,” said Jourdan. “When industry says it’s natural it’s a danger, because then no one takes accountability for the pollution.”

Ariana Spentzos, of the NGO Green Science Policy, said: “We’re following the familiar PFAS playbook by allowing reckless environmental contamination and only figuring out after the fact the trail of harm left behind. We are just beginning to understand the health hazards associated with TFA.”

Environmental groups are calling on the UK government to take more action to tackle PFAS substances. “PFAS presents a global chemical pollution crisis which requires urgent action,” said Hannah Evans, from the campaign group Fidra. “We’re calling on the UK government to prevent PFAS emissions at source, which includes revising both F-gas and pesticide regulations to phase out PFAS.”

The German Environment Agency recommends using natural refrigerants instead. Its president, Dirk Messner, said: “TFA is found everywhere – in water, soil, food and the human body. It does not break down and can hardly be removed from drinking water. However, TFA-forming chemicals are numerous and on the rise. Persistent substances from multiple sources like TFA fall through the regulatory cracks. To reduce the release of TFA into the environment, we need consistent, precautionary regulation, cross-sectoral minimisation and a substitution with TFA-free alternatives wherever possible.“

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, come in many forms and have generally got a bad press, mainly because five of the 2,000 identified species can produce some of the deadliest toxins known to science.

At the same time, they are among the oldest organisms in the world, dating back 2.1bn years, and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to use photosynthesis, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. They are responsible for creating the oxygen-rich atmosphere that enabled life on Earth to flourish and humans to evolve.

In their untold trillions, in almost every environment where there is water, even on damp rocks in deserts, they continue this valuable service, keeping the atmosphere safe for mammals to breathe.

But in nutrient-rich water, created by farm waste or sewage released into rivers and lakes, blue-green algae multiply fast, especially in warm sunshine. This is dangerous in still waters where they form dense rafts of scum that deprive the waters below of oxygen, killing fish.

In some circumstances they also create toxins that can poison animals and humans that drink it. Only laboratory tests can establish whether such algae blooms are toxic but anyone seeing one is advised to avoid it and report its presence.

Campaigners are blaming developed countries for capitulating at the last minute to pressure from fossil fuel and industry lobbyists, and slowing progress towards the first global treaty to cut plastic waste.

Delegates concluded talks in Ottawa, Canada, late on Monday, with no agreement on a proposal for global reductions in the $712bn (£610bn) plastic production industry by 2040 to address twin issues of plastic waste and huge carbon emissions.

They agreed to hold more discussions before the last summit on the treaty in Busan, South Korea, in November.

But two years on from a historic agreement in Nairobi to forge a global treaty to cut plastic waste, delegates said countries were just wasting time. A proposal from Peru and Rwanda to address for the first time the scale of plastic production in order cut waste was supported by 29 countries including Australia, Denmark, Nigeria, Portugal, the Netherlands and Nigeria, who signed a declaration, “the Bridge to Busan”, calling on all delegates to ensure plastic production was addressed.

The UK and US did not support the proposal to cut plastic production.

Juliet Kabera, the director general of the Rwanda environment management authority, said: “Rwanda’s vision for the treaty is to achieve sustainable production of plastics. We need a global target based on science to measure our collective actions.”

But as talks headed into the night on Monday, there was no agreement on putting plastic production at the centre of the treaty.

David Azoulay, the director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said while a handful of countries had taken a stand to keep ambitious proposals alive, most countries accepted a compromise at the last minute that played into the hands of petrostates and industry influences.

“From the beginning of negotiations, we have known that we need to cut plastic production to adopt a treaty that lives up to the promise envisioned … two years ago,” he said. “In Ottawa, we saw many countries rightly assert that it is important for the treaty to address production of primary plastic polymers.

“But when the time came to go beyond issuing empty declarations and fight for work to support the development of an effective intersessional programme, we saw the same developed member states who claim to be leading the world towards a world free from plastic pollution, abandon all pretence as soon as the biggest polluters look sideways at them.”

The US was singled out for criticism for blocking talks on cutting plastic production.

“The United States needs to stop pretending to be a leader and own the failure it has created here,” said Carroll Muffett, the president of CIEL. “When the world’s biggest exporter of oil and gas, and one of the biggest architects of the plastic expansion, says that it will ignore plastic production at the expense of the health, rights and lives of its own people, the world listens.”

He said that despite signalling at the G7 summit this month that it would commit to reduce plastic production, in Ottawa the US failed to follow through on its promises.

The failure to pursue ambitious cuts to plastic production came after a record number of fossil fuel and petrochemical lobbyists attended the summit in Canada.

Graham Forbes, Greenpeace’s head of delegation to the global plastics treaty negotiations, said: “The world is burning and member states are wasting time and opportunity. We saw some progress, aided by the continued efforts of states such as Rwanda, Peru, and the signatories of the Bridge to Busan declaration in pushing to reduce plastic production.

“However, compromises were made on the outcome which disregarded plastic production cuts, further distancing us from reaching a treaty that science requires and justice demands.”

Rich Gower, a senior economist at the NGO Tearfund, said: “An ambitious and effective treaty is still possible, but negotiations are on a knife-edge: time is short and strong opposition remains from the petrochemicals industry and states connected with it, even as their products pile up on street corners and in watercourses around the world.”

Representatives of the petrochemical industry said they were committed to a global treaty to cut plastic waste. But they pushed back on reductions in plastic production, an industry worth $712bn in 2023.

Chris Jahn, the council secretary of the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA), speaking on behalf of the industry group Global Partners for Plastics Circularity, said: “Our industry is fully committed to a legally binding agreement all countries can join that ends plastic pollution without eliminating the massive societal benefits plastics provide for a healthier and more sustainable world. We will continue to support governments’ efforts by bringing forth science-based and constructive solutions that leverage the innovations and technical expertise of our industry.”

Wildlife advocates are celebrating “incredible” news for the preservation of threatened bears, and a herd of historically significant wild horses, in separate north-western and upper midwestern national parks.

In North Dakota, the National Parks Service (NPS) has dropped a plan that would have seen about 200 wild horses, descended from those belonging to Native American tribes who fought the 1876 Great Sioux war, rounded up and removed from Theodore Roosevelt national park.

The scheme would have stripped the park of a cultural “emblem” of the future 26th US president’s time as a cattle rancher and hunter in the Dakota territory in the late 19th century, said the Republican North Dakota senator John Hoeven, who helped secure their preservation.

Meanwhile, in Washington, NPS has partnered with US Fish and Wildlife on a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the North Cascades ecosystem. The threatened species has not been seen in the area for more than a quarter-century.

Between three and seven bears will be released into the park each year in the groundbreaking project that could last up to a decade, with an ultimate aim of building back a healthy population of about 200 bears within six to 10 decades.

“Our national parks are spectacular places that people expect to be set aside for wildlife, they expect wildlife to be there,” said Graham Taylor, north-west program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA).

“It’s why we have multiple wilderness areas in the North Cascades, it’s why we have big pristine national parks. They are supposed to be managed to protect their resources in perpetuity, and grizzly bears, all wildlife, are a resource of the parks.

“For one generation to have wildlife, and the next generation not, is not how they’re supposed to be managed, so this really is the park service following their mission by protecting and trying to restore lost resources.”

The dropping of the NPS plan to eliminate wild horses from the North Dakota park, and reverting to a pre-existing management plan for a “healthy herd”, follows a significant public backlash to its 2022 “livestock review”.

The animals, directly descended from those ridden by Sioux chiefs in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, had “the potential to damage fences used for wildlife management, trample or overgraze vegetation used by native wildlife species, contribute to erosion and soil-related impacts … and compete for food and water resources”, an environmental assessment found.

Hoeven, and North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, became powerful allies to the preservation campaign, with the senator adding a funding provision to the 2024 interior and environment budget bill signed by Joe Biden.

“These wild horses are emblematic of President Theodore Roosevelt’s time in North Dakota, a formative experience that shaped his presidency and lasting legacy,” Hoeven said in a statement.

“Given the broad public support for maintaining the wild horses, as well as the measure we passed through Congress, this is the right call by NPS.”

Similar positive public sentiment helped drive the approval of the plan for grizzly bears in Washington, campaigners say. The proposal was first floated in 1996, the last time there was evidence of the species in the 790 sq miles national park, dropped by the administration of Donald Trump, and revived when Biden took office in 2021.

“This is incredible news,” said Kathleen Callaghy, north-west representative for Defenders of Wildlife’s species conservation and coexistence department.

“The North Cascades is one of the most incredibly intact wild lands in the US and the grizzly bear is last major mammal missing from that ecosystem, so we’d be restoring something to almost as close as we can make it to how it used to be, barring our presence.”

She said human encounters with the bears, however, were unlikely.

“It’s natural to be worried about an apex predator living potentially near humans, but people mostly misunderstand how incredibly large the North Cascades is, and how much of that land is not settled,” she said.

“We’ve seen in Montana and other areas, in Yellowstone, that bears can coexist perfectly well with humans as long as everyone is taking sensible precautions like removing garbage and carrying bear spray during hikes.

“But three to seven bears per year over all those square miles, your chances of being a hiker and encountering one are not very high.”

Native American tribes also helped push the process forward. Scott Schuyler, policy representative for the Upper Skagit tribe, said its members “celebrate this decision for the great bear, the environment, and everyone who desires a return to a healthy Indigenous ecosystem.

“We urge the agencies to move forward and put paws on the ground so the recovery may begin,” he said.

Taylor, of the NPCA, said the reintroduction process would face challenges. “Things happen, there’s no guarantee. Wildlife restoration and rewilding are tough, and there are still humans out there and other hazards,” he said.

“So identifying some good bears to bring is part of it. We don’t want bears that have any history of conflict, we’re not taking other regions’ conflict bears and moving them here. We want well-behaved, young and mostly female bears that will drive the population and tend not to migrate very far.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Tuesday that it will ban most uses of methylene chloride, a colorless liquid used for stripping paint, cleaning metal, and even decaffeinating coffee. The chemical has been linked to dozens of deaths and advocates have long called for its ban.

The new rule will require stronger worker safety protections from the harmful carcinogen for the remaining “critical” uses. All consumer use will be prohibited within a year, while most commercial and industrial use will be phased out within the next two years.

“Exposure to methylene chloride has devastated families across this country for too long,” said the EPA administrator, Michael Regan. “EPA’s final action brings an end to unsafe methylene chloride practices, ensuring no one in this country is put in harm’s way by this dangerous chemical.”

The EPA previously banned the sale of methylene chloride as a paint stripper back in 2019. A known carcinogen, methylene chloride can also cause neurotoxicity, liver damage, and in acute cases, death. Since 1980, at least 88 people have died from severe exposure to the chemical.

Most of those who died were workers who used methylene chloride for stripping paint or refinishing bathtubs. Through inhalation and skin contact, long-term exposure is associated with multiple cancers including lung, breast, brain, and cancer of the blood.

“Science has told us for decades about the dangers of methylene chloride,” said Wendy Hartley, who’s been pushing for stricter regulations of the chemical since 2017, when her 21-year-old son Kevin Hartley died from acute exposure from refinishing a bathtub at work. “I knew that there was nothing that I could do to bring my son back, but I was determined to do everything that I could to try to prevent others from experiencing the hell that my family had gone through.”

The ban unveiled on Tuesday is estimated to take 50% of the methylene chloride off the market. But the agency is not banning all uses, such as in the case of producing refrigerant chemicals, batteries for electric vehicles, plastic and rubber manufacturing, as well as use-critical military and other federal use.

“I wish these protections had been in place earlier, because for many families they’re coming too late,” said the EPA assistant administrator Michal Freedhoff.

The EPA rule does not extend to uses regulated by another agency like pharmaceuticals and food, which are overseen by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Methylene chloride is commonly used to decaffeinate coffee. When applied directly to the beans, the solvent binds to the caffeine and removes it. Earlier this year, the Environmental Defense Fund petitioned the FDA to remove the chemical from the process of producing decaffeinated coffee.

A man who allegedly harassed bison at Yellowstone national park by kicking one of the animals was injured in return and arrested in the first such encounter at the famed site this year.

Officials said on Monday that police received a report about a man kicking a bison in the leg and being injured by one of the animals about seven miles from the park’s entrance, near Seven Mile Bridge, on 21 April.

It is not uncommon for tourists who get too close to the wild animals to be hurt. Park officials have reported injuries each year at the national park, which is hugely popular with tourists.

The last such case involving a bison was in July 2023, when a 47-year-old Arizona woman was gored during mating season after she turned to walk away. In 2022, a woman who approached a bison near the Old Faithful geyser was tossed 10ft into the air and was gored.

The man’s injuries from 21 April were not described. Upon being notified of the most recent case, police said they arrested Clarence Yoder, 40, in the town of Yellowstone, Montana.

Yoder, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, was charged with disorderly conduct, approaching wildlife, disturbing wildlife and being intoxicated “to a degree that may endanger oneself”, police said.

A companion who was allegedly driving Yoder, 37-year-old McKenna Bass, also of Idaho Falls, was arrested on counts of drunk-driving, failure to yield and disturbing wildlife.

Both men subsequently pleaded not guilty in court.

National Park Service officials said visitors to Yellowstone should stay at least 25 yards (23 meters) away from all large animals, including bison, elk, bighorn sheep, moose and coyotes.

Tourists should be even more cautious around bears and wolves, with officials advising visitors to maintain a distance of at least 100 yards (91 meters) from those creatures in particular.

Beneath the turquoise waters off Heron Island lies a huge, brain-shaped Porites coral that, in health, would be a rude shade of purplish-brown. Today that coral outcrop, or bommie, shines snow white.

Prof Terry Hughes, a coral bleaching expert at James Cook University, estimates this living boulder is at least 300 years old.

“If that thing had eyes it could have looked up and watched Captain Cook sail past,” he says, back on the pristine beach of this speck of an island 80km offshore at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef.

It is not just Heron’s grand old bommie that is freshly bleached. The surrounding tangle of staghorn corals, or Acropora, are splashed in swathes of white, or painted a dappled mosaic of greens and browns that betray the algae and seaweeds growing over the freshly killed coral. Hughes estimates 90% of those branching corals are dead or dying.

Snorkelling above these blighted coral thickets evokes the imagery of forests annihilated by bushfires, or cities obliterated by missiles.

“It looks as if it has been carpet bombed,” says the Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, who has accompanied Hughes to Heron. “Like limbs strewn everywhere.”

Even Hughes, a man who has witnessed as much mass mortality of coral as any, looks shellshocked.

The Dublin-born, Townsville-based marine biologist already knew the coral ringing Heron had just experienced its worst recorded bleaching – and that this was no isolated event.

Last month the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority released a report warning that the reef was experiencing “the highest levels of thermal stress on record”. The authority’s chief scientist, Dr Roger Beeden, spoke of extensive and uniform bleaching across the southern reefs, which had dodged the worst of much of the previous four mass bleaching events to blight the Great Barrier Reef since 2016.

Hughes saw in the institute’s aerial surveys results the most “widespread event and severe” bleaching event to date, not just in the south, but across much of the entire system – which stretches 2,300km up the Queensland coast.

But none of these metrics, it seems, could truly prepare him for the act of bearing witness to the unfolding calamity he has dedicated his life to preventing.

“It’s fucking awful,” the softly spoken scientist says, emerging from the ocean. “They said the bleaching was extensive and uniform. They didn’t say it was extensive, uniform and fucking awful.

“It’s a graveyard out there.”

A toddler told her mom that “monsters” were in her closet. But in fact, there were more than 50,000 bees there.

A mother of three children under four years old was met with a “terrifying” surprise after she and her husband investigated why a handful of bees had flown into the attic of the couple’s North Carolina home.

After a visit by a pest control company and multiple beekeepers, a thermal camera finally revealed where the bees had gone – to a massive hive they had built inside the wall of her daughter’s room, where the girl was convinced she had heard a monster of some kind lurking.

“At first, I thought it was a body,” Ashley Massis Class told People magazine recently. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he says he thinks it’s a hive.”

For roughly eight months, a swarm of endangered honeybees had been building a hive inside the wall of her daughter’s room.

The beekeeper “didn’t even have his bee gear on yet, but he took a hammer and knocked into the wall”, Massis Class recalled. “Bees came swarming out like a horror movie.

“There were streams of bees, and the wall where he hit was oozing honey. But it looked like blood because it was really, really dark, running down my daughter’s pink walls. It looked really strange.”

Beekeepers ultimately removed tens of thousands of bees over several extractions, and a honeycomb weighing more than 100lb.

The bees were relocated to a bee sanctuary. Massis Class first documented the experience on TikTok, where her story went viral and caught the attention of news outlets.

After the extractions, Massis Class reassured her daughter that “Mr Monster Hunter”, as the toddler called the beekeeper, was removing all the bees. She also reassured her daughter that, after many months, the family now believed her.

There was, in fact, a kind of monster in her wall.

In addition to the work to remove the bees, there will also be repairs to Massis Class’s home. The bees and their oozing honey caused about $20,000 worth of damage to electrical wires, which the family homeowner’s insurance will not cover.

The timing of their bee encounter was a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, Massis Class and her husband had a baby before discovering the bees.

Yet Massis Class told People that meant the couple was on leave from work.

“I’m really thankful my husband and I are on leave right now and that we can deal with this situation,” she remarked. “But at the same time, hearing the sound of humming bees on the other side of a door is kind of terrifying.”

Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.

Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022.

According to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the contaminants were dispersed in 87bn gallons of wastewater – which also contains blood, bacteria and animal feces – and released directly into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands relied on for drinking water, fishing and recreation. The UCS analysis, shared exclusively with the Guardian, is based on the most recent publicly available water pollution data Tyson is required to report under current regulations.

The wastewater was enough to fill about 132,000 Olympic-size pools, according to a Guardian analysis.

The water pollution from Tyson, a Fortune 100 company and the world’s second largest meat producer, was spread across 17 states but about half the contaminants were dumped into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands in Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri.

The midwest is already saturated with nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial agriculture – factory farms and synthetics fertilizers – contributing to algal blooms that clog critical water infrastructure, exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, and deplete oxygen levels in the sea causing marine life to suffocate and die.

Yet the UCS research is only the tip of iceberg, including water pollution from only one in three of the corporation’s slaughterhouses and processing plants, and only 2% of the total nationwide.

The current federal regulations set no limit for phosphorus, and the vast majority of meat processing plants in the US are exempt from existing water regulations – with no way of tracking how many toxins are being dumped into waterways.

“There are over 5,000 meat and poultry processing plants in the United States, but only a fraction are required to report pollution and abide by limits. As one of the largest processors in the game, with a near-monopoly in some states, Tyson is in a unique position to treat even hefty fines and penalties for polluting as simply the cost of doing business. This has to change,” said the UCS co-author Omanjana Goswami.

The findings come as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must decide between robust new regulations that experts say would better protect waterways, critical habitat and downstream communities from polluting plants – or opt for weaker standards preferred by the powerful meat-processing industry.

A 2017 lawsuit by environmental groups has forced the EPA to update its two-decade-old pollution standards for slaughterhouses and animal rendering facilities, and the new rule is expected by September 2025. The agency has said that it is leaning towards the weakest option on the table, which critics say will enable huge amounts of nitrates, phosphorus and other contaminants to keep pouring into waterways.

“The current rule is out of date, inadequate and catastrophic for American waterways, and highlights the way American lawmaking is subject to industry capture,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney at Food and Water Watch. “The nutrient problem in the US is at catastrophic levels … it would be such a shame if the EPA caves in to industry influence.”

The meat-processing industry spent $4.3m on lobbying in Washington in 2023, of which Tyson accounted for almost half ($2.1m), according to political finance watchdog Open Secrets. The industry has made $6.6m in campaign donations since 2020, mostly to Republicans, with Tyson the biggest corporate spender.

“We can be sure Tyson and other big ag players will object to efforts to update pollution regulations, but the EPA should listen to communities whose wells, lakes, rivers and streams have been contaminated and put people over corporate profits,” said Goswami.

“Meat and poultry companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with EPA’s effluent limitations guidelines,” said Sarah Little from the North American Meat Institute, a trade association representing large processors like Tyson. “EPA’s new proposed guidelines will cost over $1bn and will eliminate 100,000 jobs in rural communities.”

Tyson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The American Association of Meat Processors said the EPA’s one-size-fits-all approach could put its small, family-owned members out of business.

Nebraska is a sparsely populated rural state dominated by agriculture – an increasingly consolidated corporate industry which wields substantial control over the economy and politics, as well as land and water use.

Millions of acres in Nebraska are dedicated to factory farming, with massive methane-emitting concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos) scattered among fields of monocropped soybean, corn and wheat – grown predominantly for animal feed and ethanol. Only a tiny fraction of arable land is dedicated to sustainable agriculture or used to grow vegetables or fruits.

Tyson’s five largest plants in Nebraska dumped more than 111m lb of pollutants into waterways between 2018 and 2022, accounting for a third of the nationwide total. This included 4m lb of nitrates – a chemical that can contaminate drinking water, cause blood disorders and neurological defects in infants, as well as cancers and thyroid disease in adults.

Tyson’s largest plant is located in Dakota City on the Missouri river – America’s longest waterway which stretches 2,300 miles across eight states before joining the Mississippi. It’s a sprawling beef facility, which generates a nauseating stench that wafts over neighboring South Sioux city, known locally as sewer city, where many plant workers live. (Another beef processing plant is located next to Tyson.)

Earlier this month, the Guardian saw multiple trucks waiting to offload cattle for slaughter – after which the carcasses are rendered, processed and packaged in different parts of the facility. The plant produces vast quantities of wastewater which is stored (and treated) in lagoons on the riverbank, before being released into the Missouri river which provides drinking water for millions of people.

The Dakota City plant is a major local employer and Tyson’s single largest polluter, dumping 60m lb of contaminants into waterways between 2018 and 2022, according to UCS analysis.

“This Tyson plant helped put me through college and supports a lot of migrant workers, but there’s a dark side like the water and air pollution that most people don’t pay attention to because they’re just trying to survive,” said Rogelio Rodriguez, a grassroots organizer with Conservation Nebraska, which is part of a coalition pushing for stronger state protections for meat processing plant workers.

“If regulations are lax, corporations have a tendency to push limits to maximize profits, we learnt that during Covid,” said Rodriguez, whose family works at the plant. A deadly Covid outbreak at the Dakota City plant in April 2020 sickened 15% of the workforce and led to substantial community spread.

A few miles south of the Dakota City Tyson plant, the Winnebago tribe is slowly recuperating and reforesting their land, as well as transitioning to organic farming.

“We’re investing a lot of money to look after the water and soil on our lands because it’s the right thing to do, yet a few miles north the Tyson plant lets all this pollution go into the river. Water is our most important resource, and the Missouri river is very important to our culture and people,” said Aaron LaPointe, a Winnebago tribe member who runs Ho-Chunk Farms.

The water problem – and lack of accountability – goes beyond Tyson.

Last year Governor Jim Pillen, whose family owns one of America’s largest pork companies, was widely criticized for calling a Chinese-born journalist at Flatwater Free Press a “communist” after she exposed serious water quality violations at his hog farms. Earlier this month, the Nebraska supreme court ruled that the state environmental agency could charge the same investigative news outlet tens of thousands of dollars for a public records request about nitrates.

Big ag’s influence on state politics is “endemic”, according to Gavin Geis from Common Cause Nebraska, a non-partisan elections watchdog.

“The big money spent on lobbying and campaigns by corporate agriculture has played a major role in resisting stronger regulation – despite clear signals such as high levels of nitrates in our groundwater and cancers in rural communities that we need more oversight for farmers across the board,” said Geis.

“We’ve created a system with no accountability that doesn’t protect our ecosystem – which includes the land, water and people of Nebraska,” said Graham Christensen, a regenerative farmer and founder of GC Resolve, a communication and consulting firm. “The political capture is harming our rural communities, we’re in the belly of the beast and need help from federal regulators.”

Indigenous Americans lived and farmed sustainably along the Missouri River until white colonial settlers forcibly displaced tribes, and eventually dammed the entire river system – mostly for energy and industrial agriculture. Today, major river systems like the Missouri River – and its communities – face multiple, overlapping threats from dams, the climate crisis, overuse and pollution.

Oxygen depleting contaminants like nitrogen and phosphorus from Tyson plants in the midwest have been shown to travel along river-to-river pathways, causing fish kills and contributing to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. When the river is drier due to drought or high temperatures, pollutants become more concentrated and can form sediments – which are then dislodged during floods and taken miles downstream.

Global heating is making extreme weather increasingly common, and as droughts dry up underground aquifers, tribes will probably need to turn to the Missouri for drinking water, according to Tim Grant, director of environmental protection for the Omaha tribe. “We’re very concerned about what’s in the river, it’s an important part of our culture and traditions,” said Grant, who has started testing the fish for toxins.

The UCS research also found Tyson plants located close to critical habitats for endangered or threatened species – including the whooping crane, the tallest and among the rarest birds in North America.

There are currently only 500 or so wild whooping cranes – up from 20 birds in the 1940s – which stop to feed and rest along a shallow stretch of the Platte River, a tributary of the Missouri in central Nebraska, as they migrate between the Texas Gulf coast and Canada. The majestic white birds feed in the cornfields that surround the Platte River, outnumbered by the slate gray sandhill cranes that also migrate through Nebraska each spring.

Tyson’s sprawling Lexington slaughterhouse and beef processing plant is situated less than two miles from the Platte River – among four federally designated critical habitats considered essential to conservation of the whooping crane.

“The cumulative effects of exposure to these industrial toxins could pose a long-term threat to the cranes’ food sources, reproductive success and resilience as a species,” said George Cunningham, a retired aquatic ecologist and Missouri River expert at Sierra Club Nebraska.

“Poor environmental regulation is down to the stranglehold industrial agriculture has on politics – at every level. It’s about political capture.”