Yeungs Ting collects plastic during a beach cleanup in Hong Kong in November. Without a comprehensive approach to mitigating plastics, waste is expected to triple globally by 2040.
Photo by Su Xinqi, courtesy AFP/Getty Images
Plastics have revolutionized human life, from food packaging and transportation to medical devices and computers. But the chemical products have created significant harm as well, polluting air, water and land across the globe.
This month, 175 countries will convene to hammer out a United Nations treaty on global plastics use. The session in Ottawa, Canada, is the fourth of five and involves an International Negotiating Committee made up of delegates from member states. A treaty with legally binding measures across the entire life cycle of plastics is expected in 2025.
“This is an unprecedented opportunity for negotiators to agree on a landmark international treaty on plastic pollution,” Winnie Lau, PhD, director of the Preventing Ocean Plastics project at Pew Charitable Trusts, told The Nation’s Health.
About 400 million tons of plastic waste are created annually, according to the U.N. Environment Program. Plastic waste generation tripled between the 1970s to 1990s. Without a comprehensive approach to mitigating plastics, waste will triple again by 2040.
Made from fossil fuel, plastic contributes to carbon emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions linked to manufacturing, use and disposal of fossil fuel-based plastics is expected to make up 19% of the global carbon budget by 2040.
Plastic is also an ingredient in automobile tires. According to a 2020 report from Emissions Analytics, which conducts independent auto emissions tests, tread wear combined with brake wear sheds more carbon pollution into the air than that emitted from a vehicle’s exhaust pipe.
Another concern is microplastics, tiny particles that are absorbed, inhaled or ingested by humans every day as plastic breaks up into air, water, ground and food. While plastic waste can take 20 to 500 years to decompose, it just becomes smaller and smaller, never completely disappearing, according to the U.N.
Plastic is so ubiquitous that microplastic exposure is nearly impossible to avoid. A study in January’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a quarter of a million plastic toxins circulate in one liter of bottled water, much of it leaching from the plastic bottle.
In an influential report, the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health recommended in 2023 that the U.N.’s global plastics treaty also regulate the chemical additives in plastics. The commission also pointed out the inequities of human exposure to plastics.
“They disproportionately affect poor, disempowered and marginalized populations such as workers, racial and ethnic minorities, ‘fenceline’ communities, Indigenous groups, women and children, all of whom had little to do with creating the current plastics crisis and lack the political influence or the resources to address it,” the report said.
The U.S. and U.K. are the biggest per capita creators of plastic waste, followed by South Korea, Germany and Thailand, a 2020 study in Science Advances found Only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled.
Delegates at the U.N.’s 2022 Environment Assembly agreed to work toward an international legally binding document addressing the life cycle of plastic — production, use and waste management. A workable document is expected to be fine-tuned at the April 23-29 session and in November at the final meeting in Busan, South Korea.
Treaty enthusiasm varies among nations, with wealthy member states such as the U.S. and China less active in talks, according Rachel Karasik, MEM, research scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Water Research in Oslo, Norway.
By contrast, the aptly named High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, co-chaired by Norway and Rwanda, is highly engaged. Sixty-three mostly low- and middle-income countries are part of the coalition, which supports 15 global policy interventions.
Karasik predicted that the final treaty would be similar to other multilateral environmental agreements that combine voluntary and legally binding obligations. One example of a past influential U.N. environmental treaty is the Minamata Convention on Mercury.
After three years of negotiations among over 140 countries, delegates produced a document in 2013 that dramatically reined in mercury use globally. The Minamata Convention required party nations to reduce or eliminate mercury emissions from industry; phase out or curtail products containing mercury, such as batteries, lights and pesticides; and create safer storage, improve waste management and develop a protocol for containing contaminated mercury sites, among other strategies.
The global plastics treaty could have similar far-reaching impact, Karasik said.
While many U.S. communities support recycling, only 9% of plastic produced annually is recycled around the world. A new global treaty hopes to stem some of the damages caused by plastic.
Photo by RawPixel, courtesy iStockphoto
“It’s not about whether it’s realistic or not. It’s about whether we as a society, as a global community, want to solve this problem. It’s a matter of will.”
— Winnie Lau
“The U.N. doesn’t usually call things a treaty unless it’s pretty serious,” she told The Nation’s Health.
Public discussions and reports on plastic pollution emphasize the need for sweeping changes and buy-in from all stakeholders, while also suggesting how difficult they might be to accomplish.
Back to Blue: Caring for the Ocean, an environmental organization, modeled three plastic reduction scenarios in a 2023 report. It found that a phased global ban on certain single-use plastics, such as plastic cups, tableware and straws, would be the most successful. The two other models involved making companies pay for disposal of plastic packaging and implementing a carbon tax on plastic manufacturers. But even if all three polices were phased in over several years, plastic use would slow but not significantly solve the problem, the report said.
Many experts talk about using alternative materials to plastic. But while options exist, such as biodegradable or compostable products, issues over cost, environmental damage, human health harm and compliance are prevalent. Alternatives also enable continuation of a single-use, disposable culture, Karasik said.
“I have not seen anything on the market or in the research space that feels more viable than reduction and reuse,” she said. “There is a space in the sort of ecosystem or landscape of solutions for sustainable alternatives, but I think they are far from being a panacea.”
Experts say that a comprehensive, phased approach that addresses the full life cycle of plastics could reduce plastic waste significantly, perhaps by as much as 70% over decades. But that would require cooperation from a long list of stakeholders — petrochemical companies, plastic manufacturers, waste management groups, retailers, scientists, governments, consumers.
“It’s not about whether it’s realistic or not,” Lau told The Nation’s Health about ending plastic pollution. “It’s about whether we as a society, as a global community, want to solve this problem. It’s a matter of will.”
For more information on plastic pollution and work on the treaty, visit www.unep.org.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
