🎈We’re hooked on plastic. What will it take to end our addiction?
Given plastic is so embedded in our daily lives, it’s going to take strong regulations to tackle plastic waste.
Greetings Current Climate readers!
This week Natalie’s taking a well-deserved holiday, so I’m stepping in to bring you the latest happenings in climate news — or rather, this week, a deep dive into plastics 🤿
You may have been following the UN Plastics Treaty talks that wrapped up late last week in Paris. The talks were part of multi-year negotiations aimed at creating a treaty on plastic pollution by 2024.
The outcome from last week looks promising, according to environmental groups like WWF and Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The 175 nations present at the talks agreed to create a legally binding agreement that addresses the full lifecycle of plastic, including its production, design, and disposal. The draft treaty will be created in the next few months before an upcoming meeting in Kenya in November.
As Natalie wrote about in this newsletter a few weeks ago, we currently produce about 430 million tons of plastics every year, two-thirds of which is single-use, and production is projected to triple by 2060 if we continue along the same trajectory.
To recycle or to… recycle?
You might be wondering about the role of recycling in tackling plastic waste. Although it’s considered one of the lower-impact climate actions, the consensus from climate experts is that recycling is still worth it — especially for paper, metal, and glass products — and it’s certainly better than sending those items into landfills.
But plastics are another story. They’re much more complicated to recycle effectively and safely, due to the high concentrations of toxic chemicals that go into them. Recent research shows that plastic recycling releases huge amounts of microplastics into the environment. Currently, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, with the rest being landfilled, burned, or ending up in our seas.
The UK, my home country, exports 60% of its plastic waste because of a lack of capacity to process the huge quantities generated, with most of it going to Turkey. And it’s not even the worst offender as you can see in the below graph, with Japan being the biggest net exporter of plastic waste.
Plastics aren’t just an environmental waste problem. Plastics and climate change are inextricably linked, since they are made from chemicals derived from fossil fuel production, and cause greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle. The plastic industry’s global carbon footprint in 2020 was 1.3 billion metric tons — twice as big as Canada’s, reports Grist.
Various scientific studies have raised the alarm about the impacts of plastic on our health, too. Nanoplastic particles can breach the blood-brain barrier and could contribute to the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s (although more research is needed to clarify the exact link).
Of course, we can’t completely eliminate plastics. Plastic packaging, for example, plays an important role in preventing food waste. Until we’ve figured out how to create environmentally friendly, bio-based packaging that’s as effective (there’s interesting research being done around seaweed- and mushroom-based alternatives) it may remain a necessary evil in our lives. But there’s still a lot that can be done to reduce the most insidious types of throwaway plastic.
This includes regulating the use of things like plastic cutlery, bags, and straws, but also items like sachets, thin films, and wrappers, which might seem small but all contribute to the mountains of waste we’re constantly generating.
Which brings us back to the treaty. While some countries including Kenya, the UK, and Bangladesh have introduced bans on single-use plastics, the impacts are likely to be limited because they focus on what consumers buy, rather than the supply side.
The one and only answer to the problem is to massively reduce plastic production, and that’s what many environmental advocates hope will be achieved with the UN Plastic Pollution Treaty.
However, there are fears that some countries, especially oil and plastic-producing ones such as Saudi Arabia and Brazil, will try to water down the treaty and that petrochemical lobbyists will campaign for solutions that don’t directly impact production, like waste management and recycling. In fact, with the renewable energy transition underway, the fossil fuel industry is betting on plastics as their next major growth market, as reported by CNBC.
🦜 Climate quote of the week:
“Time is running out and it is clear from this week’s negotiations that oil-producing countries and the fossil fuel industry will do everything in their power to weaken the treaty and delay the process.”
— Greenpeace USA’s Global Plastics Campaign Lead Graham Forbes
🎈 Interesting plastic stat of the week:
Plastics industry lobbyists present at the Paris talks: 190, according to Mediapart.
In short, a legally binding treaty that limits plastic production, restricting its use to reusable products and packaging, is essential if we’re really going to tackle this problem.
There’s a great overview of how to solve our plastic addiction in the latest episode of the BBC’s The Real Story podcast. I agree with their point about making the term “stupid plastics” — e.g.single-use plastic — more mainstream, to really highlight how dumb it is.
Speaking of podcasts — and something more uplifting — I’ve been really enjoying Grist’s “Temperature Check” series about people being moved by the climate crisis to make big changes in their lives and careers. Check out this moving episode on Goldman Environmental Prize winner Sharon Levigne, who’s battling the plastics industry in her hometown St. James in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — so-called because of the toxic effects of the fumes emitted by all the petrochemical plants surrounding it.
📖 A plastics dictionary
And to wrap things up, we’re bringing you a breakdown of plastics-related jargon. You know, just so we’re all aware of the different ways plastic really…sucks.
Single-use plastics — plastics that are disposed of right after use, such as straws, wrappers, and bags. Even if they’re labeled as recyclable, they still count as single-use if they can’t be reused in their current state.
Virgin plastic — new plastic produced using natural gas or crude oil and without any recycled materials.
Microplastics — plastic particles less than five millimeters in length (or about the size of a sesame seed).
Nanoplastics — particles under 0.001 millimeters in length and invisible to the naked eye, which can cross the blood-brain barrier and enter the human brain.