The recent fifth round of negotiations toward a United Nations convention to end plastic pollution ended in failure, according to the popular press. But the failure was far from total: the 170 participating countries agreed to continue talks toward a convention in the Fall of 2025.
Hopefully by then negotiators will have identified why the five sessions of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC) did not reach a satisfactory conclusion and will recognize that, as Einstein is reported to have said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
New strategies are needed not just for eliminating plastic pollution but also for dealing with climate change and many of the other environmental imperatives that are languishing in a world that is increasingly opposed to new taxes and regulations.
Some of the challenges facing the hoped-for plastics treaty include:
- Should the problem be addressed by reducing production or by increasing improved end of life management for plastic products?
- There is lack of information on responsibility for the problem. Should the burden of ending this existential problem rest with industry or with consumers?
- Should solutions be based on lifecycle analysis of the various options for replacement of plastic products or should the focus be only on elimination of discharge of plastic waste to the environment?
- Should nations, which are the only decision-makers under the United Nations system, allow the quest for a perfect solution to become the enemy of a good but imperfect solution or should the negotiators accept that reaching an imperfect but transitional solution is better than achieving no solution at all?
The only plastic waste pollution reduction initiatives that have been adopted on a large state or national scale so far have minimal impact. They include bans on bags and single use catering items, taxes and fees for bags and other single use items, mostly ineffective extended producer responsibility initiatives (trying to make those who put plastic packaging on the market pay for its end of life management), ineffective funding of innovation in end of life management of plastics, and (ineffective) bans on export of plastic waste to developing countries. All combined these initiatives will reduce global plastic pollution by less than one per cent. Even reducing plastic pollution by 50 per cent, or even 90 per cent, will do little to reduce the concern that scientists have about the health and environmental effects of plastic pollution. We need not more tinkering at the margins of the plastics problem but massive global change in the way plastics are used and managed at end of life.
On a global scale, current plastics recycling infrastructure is pathetic, leading to far more plastic waste escaping into the environment than needs to be allowed. But the recycling infrastructure problem is at least partly caused by a failure to include the full cost of management of end of life materials of any kind in our economic system. Slow progress is being made in that direction but this needs to be accelerated on a global scale.
The lack of information problem contributes one of the greatest challenges. We do not have data on the original source of much of the plastic waste that is contaminating the environment. We tend to focus on the most visible, which is packaging waste, while ignoring the less visible, including the synthetic fibres from the clothes that we wear and the textiles that we use for so many human activities.
If the most polluting plastics are to be banned we must, where necessary, identify environmentally appropriate alternatives. If fibres, wood, paper and paperboard, for example, are to be used as an alternative to plastics in many applications, we need to identify another current use for wood that can be reduced or eliminated. Otherwise if we try to replace all plastic products with fibre products it will only be a few decades before all the world=s forests are gone.
Innovation, whether in products or policies, rarely comes from complex government bureaucracies. On the challenge of plastics we need innovation as fast as we can get it. Many more investor resources need to be directed to finding environmentally sound solutions to the complex problems of plastic pollution.
For further information on the UN Environment Programme’s plastic pollution negotiations, click here.
Colin Isaacs is a chemist with practical experience in administration, municipal council, the Ontario Legislature, a major environmental group, and, for the past three decades, as an adviser to business and government. He is one of the pioneers in promoting the concept of sustainable development for business in Canada and has written extensively on the topic in the popular press and for environment and business platforms.
Featured image credit: Getty Images
